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LIFE IN EARNEST. 



Printed by Ballantyne & Company, Edinburgh. 



LIFE IN EARNEST. 
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ON 

CHRISTIAN ACTIVITY AND ARDOUR. 



NOT SLOTHFUL IN BUSINESS ; 
FERVENT IN SPIRIT ; 
5ERVING THE LORD. 



JAMES HAMILTON, D.D., F.L.S. 



NEW EDITION. 



LONDON: 

JAMES NISBET & CO., 21 BERNERS STREET. 
1863. 






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TO THE 

lu'riufecggtort artti Congregation 

OF THE 

NATIONAL SCOTCH CHURCH, 

REGENT SQUARE. 



My dear Friends, 

In the absence of sufficient personal 
intercourse, I felt desirous of sending to your 
several homes a word in season at the open- 
ing of this year ; and, as an appropriate re- 
membrancer at such a time, I have selected 
the following familiar Lectures. In printing 
them I thought it best to retain the homely 
style in which you first made their acquaint- 



vi Dedication. 

ance a few Sabbaths ago.* Should others not 
like such plainness of speech, I can at least cal- 
culate on your toleration. 

And here, my friends, were it not the restrain- 
ing thought that colder eyes than yours may look 
upon these pages, there are many things I would 
like to say. I would like to commemorate some 
of the mercies which have crowned the three 
years and a half during which we have wor- 
shipped together ; and I would like to give you 
some idea of my own affection for you. To the 
elders for counsel never asked nor adopted in 
vain — to both elders and deacons for days and 
portions of the night devoted to labours of love, 
which but for their painstaking could never 
have been accomplished — to the self-denying 
teachers of the Sabbath school and of the week- 
evening class — and to all who have contributed 
their willing aid in various schemes of useful- 
ness — I would tender a pastor's warmest grati- 
tude. And I would like to mention with thanks- 
giving to God two things which have made my 
own heart often glad — the harmony of our 



* They were delivered as part of a Course of Lectures on 
the Romans, on the morning and evening of Sabbaths, Nov. 17, 
and 24, and Dec. 1, 1844- 



Dedication. vii 

Church, and the happiness of your abodes. 
Seldom does a day transpire without seeing as 
much in-door comfort and tranquillity — as much 
mutual affection of heads of families, and pa- 
rents and children, and brothers and sisters — 
with so evident an aspect of God's blessing on 
many homes, as are an unspeakable delight to 
me. Does not God's goodness in this respect 
often strike yourselves, and make you sing the 
twenty-third psalm ? 

" My table thou hast furnished 
In presence of my foes ; 
My head thou dost with oil anoint, 
And my cup overflows. 

" Goodness and mercy all my life 
Shall surely follow me ; 
And in God's house for evermore 
My dwelling-place shall be." 

And in some measure the result of domestic 
piety and peace, I here record with gratitude, 
our congregational harmony. Sure enough we 
have hitherto dwelt together in unity ; and as I 
can truly say for my brethren, your office-bearers, 
that our anxiety is your edification, so has your 
"order" been our "joy." 

But whilst the acknowledgment of God's 
goodness is the delightful employment of a 



viii Dedication, 

closing year, it is no less incumbent, with an 
opening year, to consider what more we can do 
for the God of our mercies in the days to come. 
As a Church, we have congregational duties, and 
each member of the Church has personal duties. 
Let your minister remind you of some of these. 

i. Let this new year be a year of greater 
activity. Be diligent in your proper callings, in 
seeking personal improvement, and in doing 
good. Ply your daily employments in a Christian 
spirit, doing nothing by constraint or grudgingly, 
but adorning the doctrine of God your Saviour 
by your patient, sprightly, and thoroughgoing 
industry. Seek personal improvement. Give 
yourselves to the reading of instructive and 
religious books ; and when friends meet let them 
strive to give the conversation a profitable turn, 
and one which may minister to the use of edify- 
ing. The Young Men's Society is an incentive 
to study and an outlet for the results of reading ; 
and those young men who are desirous of mutual 
improvement should all be members of it. 
Engage in some direct effort to do good. Seek 
to leave the world the better for your sojourn in 
it. Whatever you attempt, endeavour to do it 
so thoroughly, and follow it up so resolutely, 



Dedication. Ix 

that the result shall be ascertained and evident. 
And in your attempts at usefulness, be not only- 
conscientious but enthusiastic. Love the work. 
Redeem the time. Remember that the Lord is 
at hand. 

2. Let this new year be a year of greater 
liberality. There are some objects to which of 
late you have given very largely ; and there are 
those amongst you who give to every object 
freely, and with a self-denying generosity. But 
by a little systematic forethought and contriv- 
ance, begun now and carried through the year, 
many might double their contributions without 
at all abridging their real enjoyments. The 
maxim, " I can do without it," if all Regent 
Square acted on it for a single year, might build 
a school or send out a missionary. If all the 
money which you children spend on cakes and 
toys, and which we grown-up people spend on 
play-things and parties, were put into the Lord's 
treasury, we should have as much as we wanted 
for all our congregational purposes, and a great 
deal over to help our neighbours. And whilst 
some are striving how much they can do, let 
others strive how much they can give to the 
cause of Christ this year. Those who excel in 



x Dedication. 

the one are likely to excel in the other : for just 
as those who have too little faith to give, have 
usually too little fervour to work ; so the hardest 
workers are usually the largest givers. 

3. Let this be a year of greater spirituality. 
As the holy Joseph Alleine wrote from Ilchester 
prison to his flock at Taunton, " Beloved Chris- 
tians, live like yourselves ; let the world see that 
the promises of God, and privileges of the gospel, 
are not empty sounds, or a mere crack. Let the 
heavenly cheerfulness, and the restless diligence, 
and the holy raisedness of your conversations, 
prove the reality, and excellency, and beauty of 
your religion to the world." Aim at an elevated 
life. Seek to live so near to God that you shall 
not be overwhelmed by those amazing sorrows 
which you may soon encounter, nor surprised by 
that decease which may come upon you in a 
moment, suddenly. Let prayer never be a form. 
Always realise it as an approach to the living 
God for some specific purpose ; and learn to 
watch for the returns of prayer. Let the Word 
of God dwell in you richly. That sleep will be sweet 
and that awaking hallowed, where a text of Scrip- 
ture, or a stanza of a spiritual song, imbues the last 
thoughts of consciousness. See that you make 



Dedication. xi 

progress. See that when the year is closing, you 
have not all the evil tempers and infirmities of 
character which presently afflict you ; but see to 
it that, if permitted to set up the Ebenezer of an- 
other closing year, you may be able to lookback 
on radiant spots where you enjoyed seasons of 
spiritual refreshing and victories over enemies 
heretofore too strong for you. Happy new year ! if 
its path should prove so bright and its progress so 
vivid, that in a future retrospect your eye could 
fix on many a Bethel and Peniel along its track, 
and your grateful memory could say, " Yonder 
is the grave where I buried a long-besetting sin, 
and that stone of memorial marks where God 
made me to triumph over a fierce temptation 
through Jesus Christ. Yonder Sabbath was the 
top of the hill where I clasped the cross and the 
burden fell off my back ; and that communion 
was the land of Beulah, where I saw the far-off 
land and the King in his beauty." 

My dear friends, it is a blessed thing to know 
the Saviour, to feel that your soul is safe. You 
have been in a ship when it entered the harbour, 
and you have noticed the different looks of the 
passengers as they turned their eyes ashore. 
There was one who, that he might not lose a 



xii Dedication. 

moment's time, had got everything ready for 
landing long ago ; and now he smiles and 
beckons to yonder party on the pier, who, in their 
turn, are so eager to meet him that they almost 
press over the margin of the quay ; and no 
sooner is the gangway thrown across than he 
has hold of the arm of one, and another is 
triumphant on his shoulder, and all the rest are 
leaping before and after him on their home- 
ward way. But there was another, who shewed 
no alacrity. He gazed with pensive eye on the 
nearer coast, and seemed to grudge that the 
trip was over. He was a stranger, going 
amongst strangers ; and though sometimes dur- 
ing the voyage he had a momentary hope that 
something unexpected might occur, and that 
some friendly face might recognise him in regions 
where he was going an alien and an adventurer ; 
no such welcoming face is there, and with re- 
luctant steps he quits the vessel, and commits 
himself to the unknown country. And now 
that every one else has disembarked, who is 
this unhappy man whom they have brought on 
deck, and whom, groaning in his heavy chains, 
they are conducting to the dreaded shore ? 
Alas ! he is a felon and a runaway, whom they 



Dedication. xiii 

are bringing back to take his trial there ; and 
no wonder he is loath to land. 

Now, dear brethren, our ship is sailing fast. 
We shall soon hear the rasping on the shallows, 
and the commotion overhead, which bespeak 
the port in view. When it comes to that, how 
shall you feel ? Are you a stranger, or a convict, 
or are you going home ? Can you say, " I know 
whom I have believed ?" Have you a Friend 
within the veil ? And however much you may 
enjoy the voyage, and however much you may 
like your fellow-passengers, does your heart 
sometimes leap up at the prospect of seeing 
Jesus as He is, and so being ever with the Lord ? 

The Lord send you a happy, a holy, and a 
useful year ! Accept this little token of your 
pastor's wish to help your faith and joy ; and 
believe me 

Your ever-affectionate Minister, 
James Hamilton. 



January i, 1845. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 
INDUSTRY, I 

LECTURE II. 

INDUSTRY, ....... l6 

LECTURE III. 

AN EYE TO THE LORD JESUS, . . . .32 

LECTURE IV. 

A FERVENT SPIRIT, . . . . . • 47 

LECTURE V. 

THE THREEFOLD CORD, 63 

LECTURE VI. 

A WORD TO EACH AND TO ALL— CONCLUSION, . 8 1 

NOTES, 107 

INDEX, .111 



LECTURE I. 



INDUSTRY. 



' Not slothful in hzcsiness." — Rom. xii. n. 



Two things are very certain, — that we have all 
got a work to do, and are all, more or less, in- 
disposed to do it : in other words, every man 
has a calling, and most men have a greater or 
less amount of indolence, which disinclines 
them for the work of that calling. Many men 
would have liked the gospel all the better if it 
had entirely repealed the sentence, " In the 
sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread," — 
had it proclaimed a final emancipation from 
industry, and turned our world into a merry 
playground or luxurious dormitory. But this 
is not what the gospel does. It does not 
abolish labour ; it gives it a new and a nobler 
aspect. The gospel abolishes labour much in 
the same way as it has abolished death ; it leaves 
the thing, but changes its nature. The gospel 



a hidnstry. 

sweetens the believer's work : it gives him new 
motives for performing it. The gospel dignifies 
toil : it transforms it from the drudgery of the 
workhouse or the penitentiary, to the affec- 
tionate offices and joyful services of the fire- 
side and the family circle. It asks us to do for 
the sake of Christ many things which we were 
once compelled to bear as a portion of the 
curse, and which worldly men perform for 
selfish and secondary reasons. " Whatsoever 
ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the 
Lord Jesus. Wives, submit yourselves unto 
your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord. 
Children, obey your parents in all things,, for 
this is well-pleasing unto the Lord. Servants, 
obey in all things your masters according to 
the flesh, not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, 
but in singleness of heart, fearing God ; and 
whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord 
and not unto men, knowing that of the Lord ye 
shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for 
ye serve the Lord Christ." The gospel has not 
superseded diligence. " Study to be quiet and 
to do your own business, and to work with your 
own hands, as we commanded you. If any man 
will not work, neither let him eat." It is men- 
tioned as almost the climax of sin, " And withal 
they learn to be idle, wandering about from 
house to house ; and not only idle, but tattlers 
also, and busy-bodies, speaking things which 



Actinice. 



they ought not ; " as, on the other hand, the 
healthy and right-conditioned state of a soul 
is, " Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord." 

I. This precept is violated by those who have 
no business at all. By the bounty of God's 
providence, some are in such a situation that 
they do not need to toil for a subsistence ; they 
go to bed when they please, and get up when 
they can sleep no longer, and they do with 
themselves whatever they like ; and though we 
dare not say that theirs is the happiest life, it 
certainly is the easiest. But it will neither be a 
lawful life nor a happy one, unless it have some 
work in hand, some end in view. Those of you 
who are familiar with the shore, may have 
seen attached to the inundated reef a creature, 
whether a plant or animal you could scarcely 
tell, rooted to the rock as a plant might be, and 
twirling its long tentacles as an animal would 
do. This plant-animal's life is somewhat 
monotonous, for it has nothing to do but grow 
and twirl its feelers, floating in the tide, or 
folding itself upon its foot-stalk when that tide 
has receded, for months and years together. 
Now, would it not be very dismal to be trans- 
formed into a zoophyte ? Would it not be an 
awful punishment, with your human soul still 
in you, to be anchored to a rock, able to do 
nothing but spin about your arms or fold them 



4 Industry. 

up again, and knowing no variety, except when 
the receding ocean left you in the daylight, or 
the returning waters plunged you into the 
green depths again, or the sweeping tide 
brought you the prize of a young periwinkle or 
an invisible star-fish ? But what better is the 
life you are spontaneously leading ? What 
greater variety marks your existence than 
chequers the life of the sea-anemone ? Does 
not one day float over you after another, just as 
the tide floats over it, and find you much the 
same, and leave you vegetating still ? Are you 
more useful ? What real service to others did 
you render yesterday ? What tangible amount 
of occupation did you overtake in the one 
hundred and sixty-eight hours of which last 
week consisted? And what higher end in 
living have you than that polypus ? You go 
through certain mechanical routines of rising, 
and dressing, and visiting, and dining, and going 
to sleep again ; and are a little roused from your 
usual lethargy by the arrival of a friend, or the 
effort needed to write some note of ceremony. 
But as it curtseys in the waves, and vibrates its 
exploring arms, and gorges some dainty medusa, 
the sea-anemone goes through nearly the same 
round of pursuits and enjoyments with your 
intelligent and immortal self. Is this a life for 
a rational and responsible creature to lead ? 
II. But this precept is also violated by those 



The Swallow. 5 

who are diligent in trifles, — whose activity is a 
busy idleness. You may be very earnest in a 
pursuit which is utterly beneath your preroga- 
tive as an intelligent creature, and your high 
destination as an immortal being. Pursuits 
which are perfectly proper in creatures destitute 
of reason, may be very culpable in those who 
not only have reason, but are capable of enjoy- 
ments above the range of reason itself. We 
this instant imagined a man retaining all his 
consciousness transformed into a zoophyte. 
Let us imagine another similar transformation ; 
fancy that, instead of a polypus, you were 
changed into a swallow. There you have a crea- 
ture abundantly busy, up in the early morning, 
for ever on the wing, as graceful and sprightly 
in his flight as he is tasteful in the haunts 
which he selects. Look at him, zigzagging 
over the clover field, skimming the limpid lake, 
whisking round the steeple, or dancing gaily in 
the sky. Behold him in high spirits, shrieking 
out his ecstasy as he has bolted a dragon-fly, or 
darted through the arrow-slits of the old turret, 
or performed some other feat of hirundine 
agility. And notice how he pays his morning 
visits, alighting elegantly on some house-top, 
and twittering politely by turns to the swallow 
on either side of him, and after five minutes' 
conversation, off and away to caii for his friend 
at the castle. And now he has gone upon his 



6 Industry. 

travels, gone to spend the winter at Rome or 
Naples, to visit Egypt or the Holy Land, or 
perform some more recherchi pilgrimage to 
Spain or the coast of Barbary. And when he 
comes home next April, sure enough he has 
been abroad ;— charming climate— highly de- 
lighted with the cicadas in Italy, and the bees 
on Hymettus ; — locusts in Africa rather scarce 
this season ; but upon the whole much pleased 
with his trip, and returned in high health and 
spirits. Now, dear friends, this is a very proper 
life for a bird of the air, but is it a life for you ? 
To flit about from house to house ; to pay futile 
visits, where, if the talk were written down, it 
would amount to little more than the chattering 
of a swallow ; to bestow all your thoughts on 
graceful attitudes and nimble movements and 
polished attire ; to roam from land to land 
with so little information in your head, or so 
little taste for the sublime or beautiful in your 
soul, that, could a swallow publish his travels, 
and did you publish yours, we should probably 
find the one a counterpart of the other ; the 
winged traveller enlarging on the discomforts 
of his nest, and the wingless one on the miseries 
of his hotel or his chateau , you describing the 
places of amusement, or enlarging on the vast- 
ness of the country and the abundance of the 
game, and your rival eloquent on the self-same 
things. Oh ! it is a thought, not ridiculous, 



The Book of Remembrance. 7 

but appalling. If the earthly history of some of 
our brethren were written down ; if a faithful 
record were kept of the way they spend their 
time ; if all the hours of idle vacancy or idler 
occupancy were put together, and the very 
small amount of useful diligence deducted, the 
life of a beast of the field or a fowl of the firma- 
ment would be a truer one — more worthy of its 
powers and more equal to its Creator's end in 
forming it. Such a register is kept. Though 
the trifler does not chronicle his own vain 
words and wasted hours they chronicle them- 
selves. They find their indelible place in that 
book of remembrance with which human hand 
cannot tamper, and from which no erasure save 
one can blot them out. They are noted in the 
memory of God. And when once this life of 
wondrous opportunities and awful advantages 
is over — when the twenty or fifty years of pro- 
bation are fled away — when mortal existence, 
with its facilities for personal improvement and 
serviceableness to others, is gone beyond recall 
— when the trifler looks back to the long pilgrim- 
age, with all the doors of hope and doors of 
usefulness past which he skipped in his frisky 
forgetfulness — what anguish will it move to 
think that he has gambolled through such a 
world without salvation to himself, without any 
real benefit to his brethren, a busy trifler, a 
vivacious idler, a clever fool ! 



8 Industry. 

III. Those violate this precept who have a 
lawful calling, a proper business, but are sloth- 
ful in it. When people are in business for 
themselves, they are in less risk of transgressing 
this injunction ; though even there it sometimes 
happens that the hand is not diligent enough to 
make its owner rich. But it is when engaged in 
business, not for ourselves, but for others, or for 
God, that we are in greatest danger of neglect- 
ing this rule. The servant who has no pleasure 
in his work, who does no more than wages can 
buy or a legal agreement enforce ; the shopman 
who does not enter zealously into his employer's 
interest, and bestir himself to extend his trade 
as he would strive were the concern his own ; 
the scholar who trifles when his teacher's eye is 
elsewhere, and who is content if he can only 
learn enough to escape disgrace; the teacher 
who is satisfied if he can only convey a decent 
quantum of instruction, and who does not labour 
for the mental expansion and spiritual well-being 
of his pupils, as he would for those of his own 
children ; the magistrate or civic functionary 
who is only careful to escape public censure, 
and who does not labour to make the com- 
munity richer, or happier, or better for his ad- 
ministration ; the minister who can give his 
energies to another cause than the cause of 
Christ, and neglect his Master's business in 
minding his own ; every one, in short, who per- 



Sloths and Somnambulists. 9 

forms the work which God or his brethren have 
given him to do in a hireling and perfunctory 
manner, is a violator of the divine injunction, 
" Not slothful in business." There are some 
persons of a dull and languid turn. They trail 
sluggishly through life, as if some painful viscus, 
some adhesive slime were clogging every move- 
ment, and making their snail-path a waste of 
their very substance. They do nothing with 
that healthy alacrity, that gleesome energy which 
bespeaks a sound mind even more than a vigor- 
ous body ; but they drag themselves to the 
inevitable task with remonstrating reluctance, 
as if every joint were set in a socket of torture, 
or as if they expected the quick flesh to cleave 
to the next implement of industry they handled. 
Having no wholesome love of work, no joyous 
delight in duty, they do everything grudgingly, 
in the most superficial manner, and at the latest 
moment. Others there are, who, if you find 
them at their post, you will find them dozing at 
it. They are a sort of perpetual somnambulists, 
walking through their sleep ; moving in a con- 
stant mystery ; looking for their faculties, and 
forgetting what they are looking for ; not able to 
find their work, and when they have found their 
work not able to find their hands ; doing every- 
thing dreamily, and therefore everything con- 
fusedly and incompletely ; their work a dream, 
their sleep a dream, not repose, not refreshment, 



io Industry. 

but a slumberous vision of rest, a dreamy query 
concerning sleep ; too late for everything, taking 
their passage when the ship has sailed, insuring 
their property when the house is burned, locking 
the door when the goods are stolen — men whose 
bodies seem to have started in the race of exist- 
ence before their minds were ready, and who 
are always gazing out vacantly as if they ex- 
pected their wits were coming up by the next 
arrival. But, besides the sloths and the som- 
nambulists, there is a third class — the day- 
dreamers. These are a very mournful, because 
a self-deceiving generation. Like a man who 
has his windows glazed with yellow glass, and 
who can fancy a golden sunshine or a mellow 
autumn on the fields, even when a wintry sleet 
is sweeping over them, the day-dreamer lives in 
an elysium of his own creating. With a foot on 
either side of the fire — with his chin on his 
bosom, and the wrong end of the book turned 
towards him, he can pursue his self-complacent 
musings till he imagines himself a traveller in 
unknown lands — the explorer of Central Africa 
— the solver of all the unsolved problems in 
science — the author of some unprecedented 
poem at which the wide world is wondering — 
or something so stupendous that he even begins 
to quail at his own glory. The misery is, that 
whilst nothing is done towards attaining the 
greatness, his luxurious imagination takes its 



Day-dreamers. 1 1 

possession for granted, and with his feet on the 
fender, he fancies himself already on the highest 
pinnacle of fame ; and a still greater misery is, 
that the time thus wasted in unprofitable musings, 
if spent in honest application and downright 
working, would go very far to carry him where 
his sublime imagination fain would be.* To 
avoid this guilt and wretchedness, 

i. Have a business in which diligence is law- 
ful and desirable. There are some pursuits which 
do not deserve to be called a business. ^Eropus 
was the king of Macedonia, and it was his favour- 
ite pursuit to make lanterns.t Probably, he was 
very good at making them ; but his proper busi- 
ness was to be a king, and therefore the more 
lanterns he made, the worse king he was. And 
if your work be a high calling, you must not 
dissipate your energies on trifles, on things 
which, lawful in themselves, are still as irrele- 
vant to you as lamp-making is irrelevant to a 
king. Perhaps some here are without any specific 
calling. They have neither a farm nor a mer- 
chandise to look after. They have no household 
to care for, no children to train and educate, no 
official duties to engross their time ; they have 
an independent fortune and live at large. My 

* See Note A. 

t Quoted in "Todd's Students' Guide," (chap, v.) — a book 
which no zealous student will read without being animated by 
its vigorous tone, and instructed by its wise and practical sug- 
gestions. 



12 Industry. 

friends, I congratulate you on your wealth, your 
liberal education, your position in society, and 
your abundant leisure. It is in your power to 
be the benefactors of your generation ; you are 
in circumstances to do an eminent service for 
God, and finish some great work before your 
going hence. What that work shall be I do not 
attempt to indicate ; I rather leave it for your 
own investigation and discovery. Every one 
has his own line of things. Howard chose one 
path, and Wilberforce another ; Harlan Page 
chose one, and Brainerd Taylor another. Mrs 
Fletcher did one work, Lady Glenorchy another, 
and Mary Jane Graham a third. Every one did 
the work for which God had best fitted them, 
but each made that work their business. They 
gave themselves to it ; they not only did it by 
the by, but they selected it and set themselves 
in earnest to it, not parenthetically, but on very 
purpose— the problem of their lives — for Christ's 
sake and in Christ's service, and held themselves 
as bound to do it as if they had been by Himself 
expressly engaged for it. And, brethren, you 
must do the same. Those of you who do not 
need to toil for your daily bread, your very 
leisure is a hint what the Lord would have you 
to do. As you have no business of your own, 
He would have you devote yourselves to His 
business. He would have you carry on, in some 
of its manifold departments, that work which He 



Scabiosa Succisa. 13 

came to earth to do. He would have you go 
about His Father's business, as He was wont to 
be about it. And if you still persist in living to 
yourselves, you cannot be happy. You cannot 
spend all your days in making pincushions, or 
reading newspapers, or loitering in club-rooms 
and coffee-houses, and yet be happy. If you 
profess to follow Christ, this is not a Christian 
life. It is not a conscientious, and so it cannot 
be a comfortable life. And if the pincushion or 
the newspaper fail to make you happy, remem- 
ber the reason : very good as relaxations, ever 
so great an amount of these things can never be 
a business, and "wist ye not that you should be 
about your Father's business ? " 

2. Having made a wise and deliberate selec- 
tion of a business, go on with it, go through 
with it. Persevering mediocrity is much more 
respectable and unspeakably more useful than 
talented inconstancy. In the heathery turf you 
will often find a plant chiefly remarkable for its 
peculiar roots ; from the main stem down to 
the minutest fibre, you will find them all 
abruptly terminate, as if shorn or bitten off, 
and the quaint superstition of the country people 
alleges, that once on a time it was a plant of 
singular potency for healing all sorts of mala- 
dies, and therefore the great enemy of man in 
his malignity bit off the roots, in which its 
virtues resided. This plant, with this odd 



14 Industry. 

history, is a very good emblem of many well- 
meaning but little-effecting people. They might 
be denned as radicibus prcejnorsis, or rather 
inceptis succisis. The efficacy of every good 
work lies in its completion, and all their good 
works- terminate abruptly, and are left off un- 
finished. The devil frustrates their efficacy by 
cutting off their ends ; their unprofitable history 
is made up of plans and projects, schemes of 
usefulness that were never gone about, and 
magnificent undertakings that were never 
carried forward ; societies that were set agoing, 
then left to shift for themselves, and forlorn 
beings who for a time were taken up and 
instructed, and just when they were beginning 
to shew symptoms of improvement, were cast 
on the world again. But others there are, who, 
before beginning to build, count the cost, and 
having collected their materials, and laid their 
foundations deep and broad, go on to rear their 
structure, indifferent to more tempting schemes 
and sublimer enterprises subsequently sug- 
gested. The man who provides a home for a 
poor neighbour, is a greater benefactor of the 
poor than he who lays the foundation of a 
stately almshouse, and never finishes a single 
apartment. The persevering teacher who 
guides one child into the saving knowledge 
of Christ and leads him on to established habits 
of piety, is a more useful man than his friend 



Persistency. 15 

who gathers in a roomful of ragged children, 
and after a few weeks of wanting zeal, turns 
them all adrift on the streets again. The 
patriot who set his heart on abolishing the 
slave-trade, and after twenty years of rebuffs 
and revilings, of tantalised hope and disap- 
pointed effort, at last succeeded, achieved a 
greater work than if he had set afloat all pos- 
sible schemes of philanthropy, and then left 
them, one after the other, to sink or swim. So 
short is life, that we can afford to lose none of 
it in abortive undertakings ; and once we are 
assured that a given work is one which it is 
worth our while to do, it is true wisdom to set 
about it instantly, and once we have begun, it is 
true economy to finish it. 




LECTURE II. 



".Not slothful in Business." — Rom. xii. n. 

This morning we saw how this precept is vio- 
lated by various descriptions of persons ; by- 
those who have no business at all, and those 
whose business is only an active idleness ; and 
finally, by those who, having a lawful business, 
a good and honourable work assigned them, do 
it reluctantly or drowsily, or leave it altogether 
undone. 

There are some who have no business at all. 
They are of no use in the world. They are 
doing no good and attempting none ; and when 
they are taken out of the world, their removal 
creates no vacancy. When an oak or any noble 
and useful tree is uprooted, his removal creates 
a blank. For years after, when you look to the 
place which once knew him, you see that some- 



The Uprooted Oak. 1 7 

thing is missing. The branches of adjacent 
trees have not yet supplied the void. They 
still hesitate to occupy the place formerly filled 
by their powerful neighbour ; and there is still 
a deep chasm in the ground — a rugged pit, 
which shews how far his giant roots once 
spread. But when a leafless pole, a wooden 
pin is plucked up, it comes clean and easily 
away. There is no rending of the turf, no mar- 
ring of the landscape, no vacuity created, no 
regret. It leaves no memento, and is never 
missed. Now, brethren, what are you ? Are 
you cedars, planted in the house of the Lord, 
casting a cool and grateful shadow on those 
around you ? Are you palm-trees, fat and 
flourishing, yielding bounteous fruit, and 
making all who know you bless you ? Are you 
so useful, that were you once away, it would 
not be easy to fill your place again, but people, 
as they point to the void in the plantation — the 
pit in the ground — would say, "It was here 
that that brave cedar grew : it was here that 
that old palm-tree diffused his familiar shadow 
and showered his mellow clusters ? " Or are 
you a peg — a pin— -a rootless, branchless, fruit- 
less thing, that may be pulled up any day, and 
no one ever care to ask what has become of it ? 
What are you doing ? What are you contri- 
buting to the world's happiness, or the Church's 
glory ? What is your business f 



1 8 Industry. 

Individuals there are who are doing some- 
thing, though it would be difficult to specify 
what. They are busy ; but it is a busy idle- 
ness : — 

"Their only labour is to kill the time, 
And labour dire it is, and weary woe. 
They sit, they loll, turn o'er some idle rhyme, 
Or saunter forth, with tottering steps and slow. 
This soon too rude an exercise they find — 
Straight on the couch their limbs again they throw, 
Where hours on hours they sighing lie reclined, 

And court the vapoury god soft-breathing in the wind." * 

They think that they are busy, though their 
chief business be to get quit of themselves. To 
annihilate time, to quiet conscience, to banish 
care, to keep ennui out at one door, and serious 
thoughts out at the other, are their hardest 
occupation. And betwixt their fluttering visits 
and frivolous engagements, their midnight 
diversions, their haggard mornings, and short- 
ened days, their yawning attempts at reading, 
and sulky application to matters of business 
which they cannot well evade ; betwixt mobs of 
callers and shoals of ceremonious notes, they 
fuss and fret themselves into the pleasant belief 
that they are the most worried and over-driven 
of mortal men. It is possible to be very busy, 
and yet very idle. It is possible to be serious 
about trifles, and to exhaust one's energies in 
doing nothing. It is possible to be toiling all 

* Castle of Indolence. 



Forced Labour. 1 9 

one's days in doing that which, in the infatuation 
of fashion or the delirium of ambition, will look 
exceedingly august and important, but which the 
first flash of eternity will transmute into shame 
and everlasting contempt. 

Then, among those who have really got a 
work to do, whose calling is lawful or some- 
thing more, perhaps a direct vocation in the 
service of God, there are three classes who vio- 
late the precept of the text — those who do their 
work grudgingly, or drowsily, or not at all — 
the sloths, the somnambulists, and the day- 
dreamers. Some do it grudgingly. They have 
not a heart for work ; and of all work, least 
heart for that which God has given them. In- 
stead of that angelic alacrity which speeds in- 
stinctively on the service God assigns, — that 
healthy love of labour which a loyal and well- 
conditioned soul would exhibit, — they postpone 
everything to the latest moment, and then go 
whimpering and growling to the hated task as 
if they were about to undergo some dismal pun- 
ishment. They have a strange idea of occupa- 
tion. They look on it as a drug, a penalty, a 
goblin, a fiend, something very fierce and cruel, 
something very nauseous ; and they would 
gladly smuggle through existence by one of 
those side paths which the grim giants, labour 
and industry, do not guard. 

Others again, who do not quite refuse their 



20 Indtistry. 

work, put only half a soul into it. They have 
no zeal for their profession. They somehow 
scramble through it ; but it is without any noble 
enthusiasm, any appetite for work, or any love 
to the God who gives it. If they are intrusted 
with the property of others, they cannot boast 
as Jacob : " In the day the drought consumed 
me, and the frost by night ; and my sleep de- 
parted from mine eyes. God hath seen mine 
affliction and the labour of mine hands." If in- 
trusted with the souls of others, they cannot 
reckon up " the abundant labours, the often 
journeyings, the weariness and painfulness, the 
watchings, the hunger and thirst," the perils and 
privations which, for the love of his Master and 
his Master's work, the apostle of the Gentiles 
joyfully encountered. If scholars, they are con- 
tent to learn the lesson, so that no fault shall be 
found. If servants, they aspire to nothing more 
than fulfilling their inevitable toils. And if 
occupying official stations, they are satisfied 
with a decent discharge of customary duties, 
and are glad if they leave things no worse than 
they found them. They are hireling, perfunc- 
tory, heartless, in all they do. Their work is so 
sleepily done that it is enough to make you 
lethargic to labour in their company ; and, 
before they go zealously and wakefully to work, 
they would need to be startled up into the day- 
light of actual existence — they would need to be 



The Land of Drowsy-head. 2 1 

shaken from that torpor into which the very sight 
of labour is apt to entrance them. Oh, happier 
far to lose health and life itself in clear, brisk, 
conscious working — to spend the last atom of 
strength, and yield the vital spark itself in joy- 
ful, wakeful efforts for Him who did all for us — 
than to drawl through a dreaming life, with all 
the fatigue of labour and nothing of its sweet- 
ness ; snoring in a constant lethargy ; sleeping 
while you work, and night-mared with labour 
when you really sleep. 

And, besides the procrastinating and perfunc- 
tory class, those are " slothful in business" who 
do no business at all. And there are such persons 
— agreeable, self-complacent, plausible persons 
— who really fancy that they have done a great 
deal because they have intended to do so much. 
Their life is made up of good purposes, splendid 
projects, and heroic resolutions. They live in 
the region which the poet has described : — 

" A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was, 
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye, 
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, 
For ever flushing round a summer's day." 

They have performed so many journeys, and 
made so many discoveries, and won so many 
laurels in this aerial clime, that life is over, and 
they find their real work is not begun. Like 
the dreamer who is getting great sums of money 
in his sleep, and who when he awakes opens his 



22 Industry. 

till or his pocket-book almost expecting to find 
it full, the day-dreamer, the projector awaking 
up at the close of life, can hardly believe that 
after his bright and glorious visions, he is leav- 
ing the world no wiser, mankind no richer, and 
his own home no happier for all the golden pros- 
pects which have flitted through his busy brain. 
"What a blessed world it were, how happy and 
how rich, if all the idlers were working, if all the 
workers were awake, and if all the projectors 
were practical men ! 

I trust, my friends, that many among you are 
desirous to be active Christians. Perhaps the 
following hints may be helpful to those who wish 
to serve the Lord by diligence in business : — 

i. Have a CALLING in which it is worth 
while to be busy. There are many callings in 
which it is lawful for the Christian to " abide." 
He may be a lawyer like Sir Matthew Hale, or 
a physician like Haller, Heberden, and Mason 
Goode. He may be a painter like West, or a 
sculptor like Bacon, or a poet like Milton and 
Klopstock and Cowper. He may be a trader 
like Thornton and the Hardcastles, or a philo- 
sopher like Boyle and Boerhaave. He may be 
a hard-working artisan like the Yorkshire Black- 
smith and the Watchmaker of Geneva ; or he 
may toil for his daily bread like the Happy 
Waterman, and the Wallsend Miner, and the 
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, and many a do- 



Diversity of Gifts. 23 

mestic servant of humble but pious memory. 
And the business of this ordinary calling, the 
disciple of Christ must discharge heartily, and 
with all his might. He must labour to be emi- 
nent and exemplary in his own profession. He 
should seek, for the sake of the gospel, to be 
first-rate in his own department. But over 
and above his ordinary calling as a member of 
society, the believer has his special calling as" a 
member of the Church. He has a direct work 
to do in his Saviour's service. Some who now 
hear me have so much of their time at their own 
disposal, that they might almost make their call- 
ing as members of Christ's Church the business 
of their lives. And each who is in this privi- 
leged situation should consider what is the par- 
ticular line of things for which his taste and 
talents most urgently predispose him, and for 
which his training and station best adapt him. 
The healthiest condition of the Church is where 
there is a member for every office, and where 
every member fulfils his own office ; * where 
there are no defects and no transpositions, but 
each is allowed to ply to the utmost the work 
for which God has intended him ; where New- 
ton writes his Letters, and Butler his Analogy ; 
where, in the leisure of the olden ministry, 
Matthew Henry compiles his Commentary, and 
where, in the calm retreat of Olney, Cowper 

* Rom. xii. 3-8. 



24 Industry. 

pours forth his devotional melodies ; where 
Venn cultivates his corner of the vineyard, 
and Whitefield ranges over the field of the 
world ; where President Edwards is locked up 
in his study, and Wilberforce is the joy of the 
drawing-room; where the adventurous Carey 
goes down into the pit, and the sturdy arm of 
Fuller deals out the rope ; where he who min- 
isters waits on his ministering, and he that 
teacheth on teaching, and he that exhorteth on 
exhortation, and he who has wealth gives liber- 
ally, and he who has method and good 
management rules diligently, and he who can 
pay visits of mercy pays them cheerfully. And 
if the Lord has given you an abundance of un- 
occupied leisure, He has along with it given you 
some talent or other, and says, " Occupy till I 
come." Find out what it is that you best can 
do, or what it is which, if you neglect it, is likely 
to be left undone. And whether you select as 
your sphere of Christian usefulness, a Sabbath 
class or a ragged school, a local prayer-meeting 
or a district for domiciliary visitation — whether 
you devote yourself to the interests of some 
evangelistic society, or labour secretly from 
house to house, — whatever line of things you 
select, make it your "business." Pursue it 
so earnestly, that though it were only in that 
one field of activity, you would evince yourself 
no common Christian. 



Golden Dust. 25 

2. Make the most of time. Some have little 
leisure, but there are sundry expedients, any one 
of which, if fairly tried, would make that little 
leisure longer. 

(1.) Economy. — Most of the men who have 
died enormously rich, acquired their wealth, 
not in huge windfalls, but by minute and care- 
ful accumulations. It was not one vast sum 
bequeathed to them after another, which over- 
whelmed them with inevitable opulence ; but it 
was the loose money which most men would 
lavish away, the little sums which many would 
not deem worth looking after, the pennies and 
half-crowns of which you would keep no reckon- 
ing, — these are the items which year by year 
piled up, have reared their pyramid of fortune. 
From these money-makers let us learn the nobler 
" avarice of time." One of the longest and most 
elaborate poems of recent times,* was composed 
in the streets of London by a physician in busy 
practice, during the brief snatches of time when 
passing from one patient's door to another. And 
in order to achieve some good work which you 
have much at heart, you may not be able to se- 

* Good's translation of Lucretius. A similar instance of 
literary industry is recorded of Dr Burney, the musician. 
With the help of pocket grammars and dictionaries, which 
he had taken the trouble to write out for his own use, he 
acquired the French and Italian languages when riding 
on horseback from place to place to give his professional 
instructions. 



26 Industry. 

cure an entire week, or even an uninterrupted 
day. But try what you can make of the broken 
fragments of time. Glean up its golden dust ; 
those raspings and parings of precious duration, 
those leavings of days and remnants of hours 
which so many sweep out into the waste of ex- 
istence. And thus, if you be a miser of moments, 
if you be frugal and hoard up odd minutes and 
half-hours and unexpected holidays, your care- 
ful gleanings may eke out a long and useful life, 
and you may die at last richer in existence than 
multitudes whose time is all their own. The 
time which some men waste in superfluous slum- 
ber and idle visits and desultory application, 
were it all redeemed, would give them wealth of 
leisure, and enable them to execute undertakings 
for which they deem a less worried life than 
theirs essential. When a person says, " I have 
no time to pray, no time to read the Bible, no 
time to improve my mind or do a kind turn to a 
neighbour," he may be saying what he thinks, 
but he should not think what he says ; for if he 
has not got the time already, he may get it by 
redeeming it. 

(2.) Punctuality. — A singular mischance has 
occurred to some of our friends. At the in- 
stant when He ushered them on existence, God 
gave them a work to do, and He also gave 
them a competency of time ; so much time, that 
if they began at the right moment, and wrought 



The Lost Minutes. 27 

with sufficient vigour, their time and their work 
would end together. But a good many years 
ago a strange misfortune befell them. A frag- 
ment of their allotted time was lost. They can- 
not tell what became of it, but sure enough it 
has dropped out of existence ; for just like two 
measuring-lines laid alongside, the one an inch 
shorter than the other, their work and their time 
run parallel, but the work is always ten minutes 
in advance of the time. They are not irregular. 
They are never too soon. Their letters are 
posted the very minute after the mail is made up ; 
they arrive at the wharf just in time to see the 
steamboat off; they come in sight of the ter- 
minus precisely as the station-gates are closing. 
They do not break any engagement nor neglect 
any duty ; but they systematically go about it 
too late, and usually too late by about the same 
fatal interval. How can they retrieve the lost 
fragment, so essential to character and comfort ? 
Perhaps by a device like this : suppose that on 
some auspicious morning they contrived to rise 
a quarter of an hour before their usual time, 
and were ready for their morning worship fifteen 
minutes sooner than they have been for the last 
ten years ; or, what will equally answer the end, 
suppose that for once they omitted their morn- 
ing meal altogether, and went straight out to the 
engagements of the day ; suppose that they 
arrived at the class-room or the workshop or the 



28 Industry. 

place of business fifteen minutes before their 
natural time, or that they forced themselves to 
the appointed rendezvous on the week-day, or to 
the sanctuary on the Sabbath-day, a quarter of 
an hour before their instinctive time of going, 
all would yet be well, This system carried out 
would bring the world and themselves to syn- 
chronise ; they and the marching hours would 
come to keep step again, and, moving on in har- 
mony, they would escape the fatigue and jolting 
awkwardness they must experience when old 
Father Time puts the right foot foremost and 
they advance the left ; their reputation would 
be retrieved, and friends who at present fret 
would begin to smile ; their fortunes would be 
made ; their satisfaction in their work would be 
doubled ; and their influence over others and 
their power for usefulness would be unspeakably 
augmented. 

(3.) Method. — A man has got twenty or thirty 
letters and packets to carry to their several 
destinations ; but instead of arranging them 
beforehand, and putting all addressed to the 
same locality in a separate parcel, he crams the 
whole into his promiscuous bag, and trudges 
off to the West End, for he knows that he has 
got a letter directed thither. That letter he de- 
livers, and hies away to the City, when, lo ! the 
same handful which brings out the invoice for 
Cheapside contains a brief for the Temple, and 



Busy Men and Men of Bustle. 29 

a parliamentary petition, which should have 
been left, had he noticed it earlier, at Belgrave 
Square. Accordingly, he retraces his steps and 
repairs the omission, and then performs a transit 
from Paddington to Bethnal Green ; till in two 
days he overtakes the work of one, and travels 
fifty miles to accomplish as much as a man of 
method would have managed in fifteen. The 
man who has thoroughly mastered that lesson, 
"A place for everything, and everything in its 
own place," will save a world of time. He loses 
no leisure seeking for the unanswered letter or 
the lost receipt ; he does not need to travel the 
same road twice ; and hence it is that some of 
the busiest men have the least of a busy look. 
Instead of slamming doors and ringing alarm- 
bells, and knocking over chairs and children in 
their headlong hurry, they move about deliber- 
ately ; for they have made their calculations, 
and know what time they can count upon. And 
just as a prodigal of large fortune is obliged to 
do shabby things, whilst an orderly man of 
moderate income has always an easy look, as if 
there were still something left in his pocket — as 
he can afford to pay for goods when he buys 
them, and to put something into the collecting- 
box when it passes him, and after he has dis- 
charged all his debts has still something to 
spare — so is it with the methodical husbanders 
and the disorderly spendthrifts of time. Those 



30 Industry* 

who live without a plan have never any leisure, 
for their work is never done : those who time 
their engagements and arrange their work be- 
forehand can bear an occasional interruption. 
They can reserve an evening hour for their 
families ; they can sometimes take a walk into 
the country, or drop in to see a friend ; they can 
now and then contrive to read a useful book, and 
amidst all their important avocations they have 
a tranquil and opulent appearance, as if they 
still had plenty of time. 

(4.) P7'07iiptitude. — Every scene of occupa- 
tion is haunted by that " thief of time," pro- 
crastination ; and all his ingenuity is directed 
to steal that best of opportunities, the present 
time. The disease of humanity, disinclina- 
tion to the work God has given, more fre- 
quently takes the form of dilatoriness than a 
downright and decided refusal. But delay 
shortens life and abridges industry, "just as 
promptitude enlarges both. You have a certain 
amount of work before you, and in all likelihood 
some unexpected engagements may be super- 
added as the time wears on. You may begin 
the work immediately, or you may postpone it 
till evening, or till the week be closing, or till 
near the close of life. Your sense of duty insists 
on its being done ; but procrastination says, u It 
will be pleasanter to do it by and by." What 
infatuation ! to end each day in a hurry, and 



Pro7iifititnde. 3 1 

life itself in a panic ! and when the flurried 
evening has closed, and the fevered life is over, 
to leave half your work undone ! Whatever the 
business be, do it instantly, if you would do it 
easily : life will be long enough for the work as- 
signed if you be prompt enough. Clear off 
arrears of neglected duty ; and once the dis- 
heartening accumulations of the past are over- 
taken, let not that mountain of difficulty rise 
again. Prefer duty to diversion, and cultivate 
that athletic frame of soul which rejoices in 
abundant occupation ; and you will soon find 
the sweetness of that repose which follows fin- 
ished work, and the zest of that recreation in 
which no delinquent feeling mingles, and oil 
which no neglected duty frowns. 




LECTURE III. 



AN EYE TO THE LORD JESUS. 



" Serving the Lord" — Rom. xii. n. 

"Serving the Lord." The believer is the 
happy captive of Jesus Christ ; he has fastened 
on himself Immanuel's easy yoke, the light 
burden and delicious chains of a Saviour's 
love ; and though Christ says, " Henceforth I 
call you no more servants," the disciple cannot 
give up the designation ; there is no other term 
by which, at times, he can express that feeling 
of intense devotedness and self-surrender which 
fills his loyal bosom. " Truly, O Lord, I am 
thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid." 
And far from feeling any ignominy in the appel- 
lation, there are times when no name of Jesus 
sounds sweeter in his ear than "Jesus, my 
Lord! Jesus, my Master!" and when no 
designation more accords with his feeling of 
entire devotedness than a servant of Jesus 



11 Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " 33 

Christ, the Lord's bondsman. There are times 
when the believer has such adoring views of his 
Saviour's excellency, and such affecting views 
of his Saviour's claims, that rather than refuse 
one requirement, he only grudges that the yoke 
is so easy that he can hardly perceive it, the 
burden so light that he can scarcely recognise 
himself as a servant. . He would like something 
which would identify him more closely with his 
beloved Saviour, some open badge that he might 
carry, and which would say for him, 

" I 'm not ashamed to own my Lord." 

If Christ would assign to him some task dis- 
tinct and definite — if Christ would only give him 
out of His own hand his daily work to do — he 
would like it well ; and ceasing to be the ser- 
vant of men, he would fain become the servant 
of Jesus Christ. 

And going to the Saviour in this ardent mood 
of mind, and saying, " Lord, what wilt thou 
have me to do ?" the Saviour hands you back 
the Bible. He accepts you for His servant, 
and He directs you what service He would 
have you to perform. The Book which He 
gives you is as really the directory of Christ's 
servants as is the sealed paper of instructions 
which the commander of an expedition takes 
with him when he goes to sea, or the letter of 
directions which the absent nobleman sends to 
C 



34 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

the steward on his estates, or the servant in his 
house. The only difference is its generality. 
Instead of making out a separate copy for your 
specific use, indicating the different things which 
He would have you to do from day to day, and 
sending it direct to yourself, authenticated by 
His own autograph, and by the precision and 
individuality of its details evidently designed 
for yourself exclusively ; the volume of His will 
is of a wider aspect and more miscellaneous 
character. It effectually anticipates each step 
of your individual history, and prescribes each 
act of your personal duty ; but intermingling 
these with matters of promiscuous import, it 
leaves abundant scope for your honesty and 
ingenuity to find out the precise things which 
your Lord would have you to do. Had it been 
otherwise, had there been put into the hand of 
each disciple, the moment he professed his 
faith in Christ, a sealed paper of instructions, 
containing an enumeration of the special ser- 
vices which his Lord would have this new 
disciple to render, prescribing a certain number 
of tasks which He expected that disciple to 
perform, and specifying the very way in which 
He would have them done ; in proportion as 
this directory was precise and rigid, so would 
it cease to be the test of fidelity, so would it 
abridge the limits within which an unrestricted 
loyalty may display itself. As it is, the direc- 



The Directory. 35 

tory is so plain that he who runs may read ; 
not so plain, however, but that he who stands 
still and ponders will find a great deal which 
the runner could not read. It is so peremptory, 
that no man can call Jesus Lord without doing 
the things which it commands ; but withal so 
general, as to leave many things to the candour 
and cordiality of sound-hearted disciples. It is 
precise enough to indicate the tempers and the 
graces and the good works with which the 
Saviour is well-pleased, and by which the 
Father is glorified ; but it nowhere fixes the 
exact amount of any one of these, short of 
which Christ will not suffer a disciple to stop, 
or beyond which He does not expect a disciple 
to go. The Bible does not deal in maximums 
and minimums ; it does not weigh and measure 
out by definite proportions the ingredients of 
regenerate character ; but it specifies v/hat 
these ingredients are, and leaves it to the zeal 
of each believer to add to his faith, not as 
many, but as much of each of these things as 
he pleases. Firmly averring on the one hand, 
that without each and all of these graces a man 
cannot belong to Christ ; it, on the other hand, 
omits to specify how much of each a man must 
be able to produce, before Jesus say to him, 
" Well done, good and faithful servant ; enter 
thou into the joy of thy Lord." The Bible 
announces those qualities which a man must 



36 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

have, in order to prove him born from above ; 
but it does not tell what quantity of each he 
must exhibit, in order to secure the smile of 
his Master, and an abundant entrance into His 
heavenly kingdom. By this definiteness on the 
outward side it leaves no room for hypocrisy ; 
but by this indefiniteness on the inner side it 
leaves large place for the works and service and 
faith and patience, the filial enterprise and free- 
will offerings, of those who know no limit to their 
labours, except the limit of their love to Christ. 
You will observe that at the time when you 
become a disciple of Christ, your Lord and 
Master takes the whole domain of your employ- 
ments under his own jurisdiction. He requires 
you to consecrate your ordinary calling to Him, 
and to do, over and above, many special things 
expressly for Himself. Whatsoever you do, in 
word or deed, He desires that you should do it in 
His name, not working like a worldling and pray- 
ing like a Christian, but both in work and prayer, 
both in things secular and things sacred, setting 
Himself before you, carrying out His rules, and 
seeking to please Him. One is your Master, 
even Christ, and He is your Master in every- 
thing, — the Master of your thoughts, your 
words, your family arrangements, your busi- 
ness transactions, — the Master of your work- 
ing time, as well as of your Sabbath-day, — the 
Lord of your shop and counting-room, as well 



Compensation Pendulum. 37 

as of your closet and your pew, — because the 
Lord of your affections, the proprietor of your 
very self besides. The Christian is one who 
may do many things from secondary motives — 
from the pleasure they afford his friends — from 
the gratification they give to his own tastes and 
predilections — from his abstract convictions of 
what is honest, lovely, and of good report ; but 
his main and predominant motive, that which is 
paramount over every other, and which, when 
fully presented, is conclusive against every other, 
is affection for his heavenly Friend. One is his 
Master, even Christ, and the love of Christ con- 
straineth him. 

Look, now, at the advantages of a motive like 
this. See how loyalty to Christ secures dili- 
gence in business — whether that be business 
strictly religious or business more miscellaneous. 

1. Love to Christ is an abiding motive. It is 
neither a fancy, nor a sentiment, nor an evan- 
escent emotion. It is a principle — calm, steady, 
undecaying. It was once a problem in mechan- 
ics, to find a pendulum which should be equally 
long in all weathers — which should make the 
same number of vibrations in the summer's 
heat and in the winter's cold. They have now 
found it out. By a process of compensations 
they make the rod lengthen one way as much as 
it contracts another, so that the centre of motion 
is always the same : the pendulum swings the 



38 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

same number of beats in a day of January as in 
a day of June ; and the index travels over the 
dial-plate with the same uniformity, whether the 
heat try to lengthen, or the cold to shorten, the 
regulating power. Now the moving power in 
some men's minds is sadly susceptible of sur- 
rounding influences. It is not principle, but 
feeling, which forms their pendulum-rod ; and 
according as this very variable material is 
affected, their index creeps or gallops, they 
are swift or slow in the work given them to do. 
But principle is like the compensation-rod, 
which neither lengthens in the languid heat, 
nor shortens in the brisker cold ; but does the 
same work day by day, whether the ice-winds 
whistle, or the simoom glows. Of all principles, 
a high-principled affection to the Saviour is the 
steadiest and most secure. Other incentives to 
action are apt to alter or lose their influence alto- 
gether. You once did many things for the sake 
of friends whose wishes expressed or understood 
were your incentive, and whose ready smile was 
your recompence. But that source of activity is 
closed. Those friends are now gone where your 
industry cannot enrich them, nor your kindness 
comfort them. Or if they remain, they are no 
longer the same that once they were. The magic 
light has faded from off them. The mysterious 
interest which hovered round them has gone up 
like a mountain mist, and left them in their 



Popularity. 39 

wintry coldness or natural ruggedness ; no 
longer those whom once you took them to 
be. Or you did many things for fame ; and 
you were well requited for a winter's work when 
the hosanna of a tumultuous assembly, or the 
paean of a newspaper paragraph proclaimed you 
the hero of the hour. But even that sort of satis- 
faction has passed away, and, meagre diet as 
these plaudits always were, you stand on the 
hungry pinnacle, and, like other aspirants of the 
same desert-roaming school,* you snuff; but 
alas ! the breeze has changed. The popular 
taste, the wind of fashion, has entirely veered 
about ; and, except an occasional tantalizing 
whiff from the oasis of a receding popularity, the 
sweet gust of its green pastures regales you no 
more. Or you used to work for money — for lite- 
ral bank-notes and pieces of minted metal. Yes, 
mere money was your motive. And you would 
sit up till midnight, or rise in the drowsy morn- 
ing, to get one piece more. And so truly was 
this money your chief end — " Where the trea- 
sure is, there will the heart be also" — do you 
not feel as if your money-safe were the metro- 
polis of your affections ? Where your money is, 
is not your heart there also ? Were your for- 
tune to clap its wings and fly away, would not 
you feel as if your happiness had flown away ? 
Have not your very thoughts got a golden tinge? 

* Jer. xiv. 6. 



40 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

and, tracing some of this Sabbath's meditations 
back to their source, would you not soon land 
in the till, the exchange, the counting-room ? Is 
not gold your chiefest joy ? But have not flashes 
of truth from time to time dismayed you ? "What 
am I living for ? For a make-believe like this ? 
for a glittering cheat which (in the way that I 
am using it) will be forgotten in heaven or felt 
like a canker in hell ? How shall I wake up my 
demented self from this spell-dream, and seek 
some surer bliss some more enduring joy For 
grant that I shall be buried in a coffin of gold, 
and commemorated in a diamond shrine, what 
the happier will it make the me that then shall 
be ? " And even without these brighter convic- 
tions, without these momentary breaks in the 
general delirium of covetousness, do you not 
feel a duller dissatisfaction occasionally creeping 
over you and paralyzing your busy efforts ? " Well 
— is this right ? This headlong hunt of fortune, 
is it the end for which my Creator sent me into 
the world ? Is it the highest end for which my 
immortal self can live ? Is it the best way of 
bestowing that single sojourn in this probation- 
world, which God has given me ? And what 
am I the better ? Am I sure that I myself am 
the happier for it ? Dare I flatter myself that, 
in bequeathing so much money, I bequeath to 
my children consolidated happiness, a sure and 
. certain good, an inevitable blessing ? " And 



Money-making. 41 

such intrusive thoughts, whose shadows, at 
least, flit across most serious minds, are very- 
damping to effort — very deadening to diligence 
in business. Merely serving your friends, in 
mere pursuit of fame, merely seeking a fortune, 
you are in constant danger of having all motive 
annihilated, and so all effort paralyzed. But 
whatever be the business in hand, from the 
veriest trifle up to the sublimest enterprise ; from 
binding a shoe-latchet to preparing a highway 
for the Lord ; if only you be conscious that this 
is the work which He has given you to do, you 
can go on with a cheerful serenity and strenuous 
satisfaction ; for you will never want a motive. 
And it is just when other motives are relaxing 
into languor, that the compensation we spoke of 
comes into play ; and the constraining love of 
Christ restores the soul and keeps its rate of 
activity quick and constant as ever. The love 
of Christ is an abiding motive, and can only lose 
its power where reason has lost its place. No 
man ever set the Lord before him and made it 
his supreme concern to please his Master in 
heaven, yet lived to say, " What a fool am I ! 
What a wasted life is mine ! What vanity and 
vexation has Christ's service been ! Had I only 
my career to begin anew, I would seek another 
master and a higher end." * The Lord Jesus 
ever lives, and never changes ; and therefore the 

* See Life of Rev. Henry Venn, under a.d. 1785. 



42 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

believer's love to his Saviour never dies. Grow- 
ing acquaintance may bring out new aspects of 
His character ; but it will never disclose a reason 
why the believing soul should love Him less than 
it loved at first. Growing acquaintance will only 
divulge new reasons for exclaiming, " Worthy is 
the Lamb ! " and fresh motives for living not 
unto ourselves, but unto Him that loved us and 
gave Himself for us. 

2. Love to Christ is a motive equal to all 
emergencies. There is a ruling passion in 
every mind ; and when every other considera- 
tion has lost its power, this ruling passion re- 
tains it influence. When they were probing 
among his shattered ribs for the fatal bullet, the 
French veteran exclaimed, " A little deeper and 
you will find the emperor." The deepest affec- 
tion in a believing soul is the love of its 
Saviour. Deeper than the love of home, deeper 
than the love of kindred, deeper than the love of 
rest and recreation, deeper than the love of life 
is the love of Jesus. And so, when other spells 
have lost their magic, when no name of old 
endearment, no voice of onwaiting tenderness, 
can disperse the lethargy of dissolution, the 
name that is above every name, pronounced by 
one who knows it, will kindle its last animation 
in the eye of death. And when other persua- 
sives have lost their power ; when other loves 
no longer constrain the Christian ; when the 



True Loyalty. 43 

love of country no longer constrains his patriot- 
ism, nor the love of his brethren his philan- 
thropy, nor the love of home his fatherly affec- 
tion, the love of Christ will still constrain his 
loyalty. There is a love to Jesus which nothing 
can destroy. There is a leal-heartedness which 
refuses to let a much-loved Saviour go, even 
when the palsied arm of affection is no longer 
conscious of the benignant form it embraces. 
There is a love, which amidst the old and weary 
feel of waning years renews its youth, and 
amidst outward misery and inward desolation 
preserves its immortal root ; which, even when 
the glassy eye of hunger has forgot to sparkle, 
and the joy at the heart can no longer mantle 
on the withered cheek, still holds on, faithful to 
Jesus, though the flesh be faint. This was the 
love which made Paul and Silas, fatigued and 
famished as they were, and sleepless with pain, 
sing praise so loud that their fellow-prisoners 
heard and wondered. This was the love which 
burned in the apostle's breast, even when 
buffeting the Adriatic's wintry brine, and made 
the work which at Rome awaited him beam 
like a star of hope through the drowning dark- 
ness of that dismal night. This was the love 
which thawed his pen, when the moan of 
autumn winds made him miss the cloak he left 
at Troas, and impelled him to write to Timothy 
a testamentary entreaty to "hold fast" the 



44 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

truths which were hastening himself to martyr- 
dom. Devotedness to Christ is a principle 
which never dies, and neither does the diligence 
which springs from it. 

Dear brethren, get love to the Lord Jesus, 
and you have everything. Union to Jesus is 
salvation. Love to Jesus is religion. Love to 
the Lord Jesus is essential and vital Chris- 
tianity. It is the mainspring of the life of God 
in the soul of man. It is the all-inclusive germ, 
which involves within it every other grace. It 
is the pervasive spirit, without which the most 
correct demeanour is but dead works, and the 
seemliest exertions are an elegant futility. 
Love to Christ is the best incentive to action — 
the best antidote to idolatry. It adorns the 
labours which it animates, and strengthens the 
friendships which it sanctifies. It is the smell 
of the ivory wardrobe — the precious perfume of 
the believer's character — the fragrant mystery 
which only lingers round those souls which 
have been to a better clime. Its operation is 
most marvellous ; for when there is enough of 
it, it makes the timid bold, and the slothful dili- 
gent. It puts eloquence into the stammering 
tongue, and energy into the withered arm, and 
ingenuity into the dull, lethargic brain. It 
takes possession of the soul, and a joyous lustre 
beams in languid eyes, and wings of new obedi- 
ence sprout from lazy, leaden feet. Love to 



Love to Christ. 45 

Christ is the soul's true heroism, which courts 
gigantic feats, which selects the heaviest loads 
and the hardest toils, which glories in tribula- 
tions, and hugs reproaches, and smiles at death 
till the king of terrors smiles again. It is the 
aliment which feeds assurance — the opiate 
which lulls suspicions — the oblivious draught 
which scatters misery and remembers poverty- 
no more. Love to Jesus is the beauty of the 
believing soul ; it is the elasticity of the willing 
steps, and the brightness of the glowing counte- 
nance. If you would be a happy, a holy and a 
useful Christian, you must be an eminently 
Christ-loving disciple. If you have no love to 
Jesus at all, then you are none of his. But if 
you have a little love — ever so little — a little 
drop, almost frozen in the coldness of your icy 
heart — oh ! seek more. Look to Jesus, and cry 
for the Spirit till you find your love increasing ; 
till you find it drowning besetting sins ; till you 
find it drowning guilty fears — rising, till it touch 
that index, and open your closed lips — rising, 
till every nook and cranny of the soul is filled 
with it, and all the actions of life and relations 
of earth are pervaded by it — rising, till it swell 
up to the brim, and, like the apostle's love, rush 
over in a full assurance — "Yes, I am persuaded, 
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any 



4.6 An Eye to the Lord Jesus. 

other creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord." 

" Let troubles rise, and terrors frown, 
And days of darkness fall , 
Through Him all dangers we '11 defy, 
And more than conquer all." 




LECTURE IV. 



A FERVENT SPIRIT. 



"Fervent in spirit," — Rom. xii n. 

The description of work which a man performs 
will depend very much on the master whom he 
serves ; but the amount and quality of that 
work will depend as much on the mood of mind 
in which he does it. The master may be good ; 
and the things which he commands may be 
good ; but unless the servant have an eager 
willing mind, little work may be done, and that 
little may not be well done. This is the glory 
of the gospel. It not only invites you to be the 
disciples of a Saviour, whose requirements are 
as worthy of your most strenuous obedience as 
He himself is worthy of your warmest love ; 
but it undertakes to give you the energy and 
enterprise which the service of such a Master 
demands. Besides assigning a good and hon- 
ourable work for your "business," and Him 



48 A Fervent Spirit. 

whom principalities and powers adore for your 
Master, the gospel offers you the zealous mind 
which such a work requires, and which such a 
Master loves. 

But what is a fervent spirit ? 

i. It is a believing spirit. Few men have 
faith. There are few to whom the Word of 
God is solid, to whom "the things hoped for" 
are substantial, or " the things unseen " evident. 
There are few who regard the Lord Jesus as 
living now, or as taking a real and affectionate 
charge of His people here on earth. There are 
few who yet expect to see Him, and who are 
laying their account with standing before His 
great white throne. But the believer has got an 
open eye. He has looked within the veil. He 
knows that the things seen are temporal, and 
that the things unseen are eternal. He knows 
that the Lord Jesus lives, and that though un- 
seen He is ever near. He may often forget, 
but he never doubts His promise ; " And lo ! I 
am with you always." This assurance of his 
ascending Saviour, every time he recalls it, 
infuses alacrity, animation, earnestness. The 
faith of this is fervour. "Yes, blessed Saviour ! 
art Thou present now? and seest Thou Thy 
disciple trifling thus ? Is the book of remem- 
brance filling up, and are these idle words and 
wasted hours my memorial there? And art 
Thou coming quickly and bringing Thy reward, 



St Peter. 49 

to give each servant as his work shall be ? and 
is this my ' work ? ' Lord, help mine unbelief. 
Dispel my drowsiness. Supplant my sloth, and 
perfect Thy strength in me." 

2. A fervent spirit is an affectionate spirit. 
It is one which cries Abba, Father. It is full 
of confidence and love. Peter had a fervent 
spirit, but it would be hard to say whether most 
of his fervour flowed through the outlet of 
adoration or activity. You remember with 
what a burst of praise his first epistle begins, 
and how soon he passes on to practical 
matters : — " Blessed be the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his 
abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a 
lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ 
from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, 
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away." 
"Wherefore, laying aside all malice, and all 
guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil 
speakings, as new-born babes, desire the sincere 
milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby." 
"Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your 
own husbands." " The elders which are among 
you I exhort, who am also an elder." * And as 
in his epistle, so in his living character. His 
full heart put force and promptitude into every 
movement. Is his Master encompassed by 
fierce ruffians ? Peter's ardour flashes in his 

* 1 Peter, commencement of chaps, i. ii. iii. v. 
D 



5<d A Fervent Spirit. 

ready sword, and converts the Galilean boat- 
man into the soldier instantaneous. Is there a 
rumour of a resurrection from Joseph's tomb ? 
John's nimbler foot distances his older friend, 
but Peter's eagerness outruns the serener love 
of John, and past the gazing disciple he bolts 
breathless into the vacant sepulchre. Is the 
risen Saviour on the strand ? His comrades 
secure the net, and turn the vessel's head for 
shore ; but Peter plunges over the vessel's side, 
and struggling through the waves, in his drip- 
ping coat falls down at his Master's feet. Does 
Jesus say, " Bring of the fish ye have caught ?" 
Ere any one could anticipate the word, Peter's 
brawny arm is lugging the weltering net with 
its glittering spoil ashore ; and every eager 
movement unwittingly is answering beforehand 
the question of his Lord, " Simon, lovest thou 
me ? " And that fervour is the best, which, like 
Peter's, and as occasion requires, can ascend in 
ecstatic ascriptions of adoration and praise, or 
follow Christ to prison and to death ; which can 
concentrate itself on feats of heroic devotion, or 
distribute itself in the affectionate assiduities of 
a miscellaneous industry. 

3. A fervent spirit is a healthy spirit. When 
a strong spring gushes up in a stagnant pool, it 
makes some commotion at the first ; and look- 
ing at the murky stream with its flotilla of duck- 
weed tumbling dov/n the declivity, and the 



The Stagnant Pool. 5 1 

expatriated newts and horse-leeches crawling 
through the grass, and inhaling the miasma 
from the inky runnel, you may question whether 
the irruption of this powerful current has made 
matters any better. But come anon, when the 
living water has floated out the stagnant ele- 
ments, and when, instead of mephitic mud 
skinned over with a film of treacherous ver- 
dure, the bright fountain gladdens its mirrored 
edge with its leaping fulness, then trips away on 
its merry path, the benefactor of thirsty beasts 
and weary fields. So the first manifestations 
of the new and the spiritual element in a carnal 
mind are of a mingled sort. The pellicle of 
decency, the floating duckweed of surface-seem- 
liness, which once spread over the character, is 
broken up, and accomplishments and amusing 
qualities, which made the man very companion- 
able and agreeable, have for the present disap- 
peared. There is a great break-up ; and it is 
the passing away of the old things which is at 
first more conspicuous and less pleasing than 
the appearance of the new. In these earlier 
stages of regenerate history, the contrition and 
self-reproach of the penitent often assume the 
form of an artificial demureness and voluntary 
humility; and in the general disturbance of 
those elements which have long lain in their 
specious stagnation, defects of character for- 
merly hidden are perceived sooner than the 



52 A Fervent Spirit. 

beauties of a holiness scarce yet developed. 
But " spring up, O well ! sing ye unto it." If 
this incursive process go freely on — if the living 
water spring up fast enough to clear out the 
•sedimentary selfishness of the natural mind, 
with its reptile inmates — if the inflowings of 
heavenly life be copious enough to impart a 
truly " fervent spirit " * — come again. Survey 
that character when the love of God has become 
its second nature. In place of the silt and evil 
savour, the mean and sordid motives which once 
fermented there, view the simplicity and godly 
sincerity — the light-welcoming transparency, 
which reflects the Sun of Righteousness above 
it, and the forms of truth around it ; and instead 
of the fast-evaporating scantiness of its former 
selfishness, follow its track of diffusive freshness 
through the green pastures which it gladdens, 
and beneath those branches which gratefully 
sing over it.f Like a sweet fountain, a fervent 
spirit is beneficent ; its very health is healing ; 
its peace with God and joy from God are doing 
constant good ; the gospel of its smiling aspect 
impresses strangers and comforts saints. And 
besides this unconscious and incidental useful- 
ness, its active outpourings are a benefit as wide 
as its waters run. A Christian who is both active 

* Compare the original, ra) nveiifxan £eovres } with John 
iv. 14, and vii. 38, 36. 
t Ps. cvi 10, 12. 



The Intermitting Spri?ig. 53 

and fervent is doing perpetual good, and good in 
the most benignant way. The substantial ser- 
vice he does is doubly blessed by the joyful, 
loving, and hopeful spirit in which he does it ; 
and though it were only by the gladness which 
skirts its course, and the amenities which bloom 
wherever it overflows, beholders might judge 
how " living," how life-awakening that water is, 
which Jesus gives to them that believe in Him. 
The best, the healthiest, is that calm and con- 
stant fervour we have now described ; but just 
as there are intermitting springs which take long 
time to fill, and then exhaust their fulness in a 
single overflow — and as there are geysers which 
jet their vociferous waters high in air, and then 
are silent for long together — so there are Chris- 
tians who do not lack fervour, but it comes in fits. 
They are intermitting springs ; they take long to 
fill, and are emptied in a single gush. Or they 
are geysers. Some years ago they went up in 
an explosion of zeal — a smoking whirlspout of 
fervour — but all is cold and silent now. The 
water is living, but the well is peculiar ; it is 
only periodically filled ; it seldom overflows. 
But just as you would not like to depend on 
an intermitting fountain for your cup of daily 
water, nor to owe the irrigation of your fields 
to the precarious bounty of a boiling spring — 
as the well near which you pitch your tent or 
build your house, is the Elim whose bulging 



54 A Fervent Spirit. 

fulness invites you to plunge your pitcher at 
any hour, and whose deep-fed copiousness is 
constantly wimpling off in fertilising streams — 
so you may be happy to perceive the incidental 
usefulness even of that zeal which comes fit- 
fully ; but you would select as the benefactor of 
the Church, and as your own resort, the full 
heart to which you never can come wrong, and 
whose perennial redundance bespeaks a secret 
feeding from the river which makes glad the city 
of our God. 

4. A fervent spirit is a happy spirit. Health 
is happiness. Peace with God is the life of the 
soul, and joy in God is its health. That assured 
and elevated believer who enjoys everything in 
God and God in everything, must needs be fer- 
vent. His inward blessedness makes him boun- 
tiful, and to do good and to communicate are 
things which in his happy mood of mind he 
cannot help. Some Christians are too dejected. 
They get under the covert of a peculiar theology, 
or ensconce themselves in shadowy caves of wil- 
fulness, or pertinacity, or unbelief; and then 
they complain that they cannot see the Sun of 
Righteousness. He lightens the world.* Let 
them come out beneath His beams, and at once 
they will feel the fire. Their shivering faith, 
which with them is rather the reminiscence of 
heat, than a resorting to its unfailing Source, 

* John i 9. 



The Burden-bearers 55 

will soon mount up to fervour. To look to 
Jesus is to come to God, and to come home to 
God is to be happy. An estranged or suspi- 
cious spirit cannot be fervent. Then some 
Christians are not fervent because they are 
cumbered with so many things. They carry all 
their own burdens, and from their sympathising 
dispositions they have charged themselves with 
many burdens of their brethren also ; but in- 
stead of devolving these personal and relative 
solicitudes on an all-sufficient Saviour, they 
carry the whole melancholy load themselves. 
A fearful or a fretful spirit cannot be fervent ; 
but there is no need for a believer in Jesus to 
be troubled or afraid.* Let him deposit all his 
anxieties in that ear which is gracious enough 
to attend to the most trivial, and leave them in 
that hand which is mighty enough to disperse 
the most tremendous ; and relieved of this in- 
cubus, his spirit will acquire an elasticity equal 
to the most arduous or most multifarious toils. 
And some believers are not sufficiently fervent, 
from being straitened in themselves. They do 
not open their souls to those felicitating influ- 
ences with which a God of love surrounds them 
on every side. There is as much comfort in the 
Word of God, and as much beauty in His 
works, and as much kindness in His dispensa- 
tions, as, admitted into the soul, would inundate 

* John xiv. 1. 



56 A Fervent- Spirit. 

it with ecstasy. But many hearts are perverse ; 
they let gloomy thoughts and bitter fancies flow- 
freely in, and are almost jealous lest a drop of 
strong consolation should trickle through on 
this deluge of Marah. Brethren, it depends on 
which flood-gate you open, whether you be 
drowned in a tide of joy or of sorrow. It de- 
pends on whether your well-springs are above or 
beneath, whether with you consolation or grief 
shall abound. If you listen to what the Amen, 
the Faithful Witness, is saying,* and what God 
the Father is saying,! and what the Spirit and 
the Bride are saying,J and what a glorious uni- 
verse is saying,§ and what the gracious events 
in your daily history are saying,|| your murmur- 
ings will subside into silence, and your vexing 
thoughts will be drowned in gratitude. Think 
much of God's chief mercy, and take thankful 
note of His lesser gifts. And when you have 
put on this girdle of gladness, your glory will 
sing and your gratitude will dance.1T Your soul 
will be happy, and your joy will find outlets of 
adoring praise and vigorous industry. 

5. A fervent spirit is one filled with the Spirit 
of God. When Jesus cried, " If any man thirstj 
let him come unto me and drink," and promised 

* John xlv.-xvi. f Matt. iii. 17. 

t Rev. xxii. 17. § Ps. vii., xix., civ. 

|| Ps. cvii. ; Isa. xxxviii.- 19 ; Gen. xxxv. 3. 
^ Ps. xxx. 11, 12 



The Comforter. 57 

that rivers of living water should flow through the 
heart of the believer, "He spake of the Spirit 
which they that believe on him should receive." 
The Holy Spirit is actually bestowedonthe people 
of God. He is to them a better Spirit, renewing 
and sanctifying their own. He is the author of that 
athletic self-denial and flesh-conquering fervour 
of which they are conscious from time to time. 
It is He who gives such delight in drawing near 
to God, that the believer at seasons could " pray 
and never cease ; " and it is He who gives that 
transforming affection to the person of Christ, 
and that heroic ardour in the service of Christ, 
to which inactivity is irksome, and silence op- 
pressive. And whosoever would enjoy the gentle 
guidance which leads into all truth and all duty 
1 — whosoever would persevere in the placid dis- 
charge of allotted labour, and maintain amidst 
it all a calm and thankful walk with God, must 
put himself at the disposal of this heavenly 
Visitant. The heart is "dry as summer's dust" 
from which the Spirit of God departs ; and that 
is the believing, loving, happy, and energetic 
heart in which the Holy Spirit dwells. 

6. A fervent spirit is a prayerful spirit. The 
Holy Spirit is the New Testament gift most ab- 
solutely promised in answer to prayer ; * and 
though, perhaps, the gift whose bestowment is 
least the' matter of a lively consciousness to the 

* Luke xi. 13 ; John xiv. 14, 16, xvi. 24. 



58 A Fet vent Spirit. 

recipient at the moment, the gift from which, 
in the long-run of life, the largest and most im- 
portant results are evolved, and the gift which, 
in the retrospect of eternity, the believer may- 
find that he enjoyed more abundantly and more 
constantly than he himself ever imagined. As 
it is, there are times when the presence of this 
Almighty Comforter is easily realised. When 
the soul is lifted far above its natural selfish- 
ness, so that it can make vast sacrifices with- 
out any misgiving ; when fortified against its 
natural timidity, so that it can face frightful perils 
without any trepidation ; and when invigorated 
with such unwonted ardour as to forget its 
natural indolence and surmount its inherent 
weakness, the soul can readily understand that 
this mighty strengthening inwardly is the work 
of the Holy Spirit. And it is this persuasion 
which brings the believer strength in weakness. 
Conscious of lethargy creeping over him, 
alarmed at the declension of his zeal and the 
waning of his love, fearful to what his present 
apathy may grow, and remembering how differ- 
ent were the days of old, he breathes a prayer, 
at first faint and desponding, but still a prayer : 
"Wilt thou not revive us again? Awake, O 
north wind ; come, thou south." And, whilst 
he is yet speaking, he begins to revive." As jf 
the clear weather were brightening the atmo- 
sphere, the great realities grow distinct and draw 



Hoiv the Snow Melts. 59 

nigh. The things eternal are seen again, and the 
powers of the coming world are felt. His soul 
is restored. Or a great work is given him to 
do, and his strength is small. " O Lord, with 
thee is the fountain of life. Lord, pity me, for I 
am weak." And the Lord pities him, and sends 
forth His quickening Spirit • and the difficulty 
is surmounted and the work is done: and, 
without so much as feeling the fire and water 
which lay between, he gains the wealthy place. 

7. A fervent spirit is one which easily sunders 
a man from selfishness, and sloth, and other 
besetting sins. On a winter's day I have 
noticed a row of cottages, with a deep load of 
snow on their several roofs ; but as the day 
wore on, large fragments began to tumble from 
the eaves of this one and that other, till, by and 
by, there was a simultaneous avalanche, and 
the whole heap slid over in powdery ruin on 
the pavement ; and before the sun went down, 
you saw each roof as clear and dry as on a 
summer's eve. But here and there you would 
observe one with its snow-mantle unbroken, 
and a ruff of stiff icicles around it. What made 
the difference ? - The difference was to be found 
within. Some of these huts were empty, or the 
lonely inhabitant cowered over a scanty fire ; 
whilst the peopled hearth and the high-blazing 
fagots of the rest created such an inward 
warmth that grim winter melted and relaxed his 



60 A Fervent Spirit. 

gripe, and the loosened mass folded off and 
tumbled over on the trampled street. It is pos- 
sible by some outside process to push the main 
volume of snow from the frosty roof, or chip off 
the icicles one by one. But they will form 
again, and it needs an inward heat to create a 
total thaw. And so, by sundry processes, you 
may clear off from a man's conduct the dead 
weight of conspicuous sins ; but it needs a 
hidden heat, a vital warmth within, to produce 
such a separation between the soul and its be- 
setting iniquities, that the whole wintry incubus, 
the entire body of sin will come spontaneously 
away. That vital warmth is the love of God 
abundantly shed abroad — the kindly glow which 
the Comforter diffuses in the soul which He 
makes His home. His genial inhabitation 
thaws that soul and its favourite sins asunder, 
and makes the indolence and self-indulgence 
and indevotion fall off from their old resting- 
place on that dissolving heart. The easiest 
form of self-mortification is a fervent spirit. 

8. And a fervent spirit is the most abundant 
source of an active life. In heaven there is a 
perfect activity, because in heaven there is a 
perfect fervour. They are all happy there. 
They have a sufficient end in all they do. 
There is no wearying in their work, for there is 
no waning in their love. The want of a suffi- 
cient object would make any man idle. A 



Newt l o?i , Reynolds ; Heyne. 61 

friend once found the author of the " Seasons " 
in bed long after noon ; and upbraiding him for 
his indolence, the poet remarked, that he just 
lay still because, although he were up, he would 
have nothing to do. But, even in this sluggish 
world, there are those whom hearty relish of 
their work and sense of its importance so in- 
spire, that they are very loth when slumber con- 
strains them to quit it, and often prevent the 
dawning in order to resume it. It was mathe- 
matical fervour which kept Newton poring on 
his problems till the midnight wind swept over 
his pages the ashes from his long-extinguished 
fire. It was artistic fervour which kept Rey- 
nolds with the pencil in his glowing hand for 
thirty-six hours together, evoking from the 
canvas forms of beauty that seemed glad to 
come. It was poetic fervour which sustained 
Dryden in a fortnight's frenzy, when composing 
his Ode for St Cecilia's day, heedless of priva- 
tions which he did not so much as perceive. It 
was classical fervour which, for six successive 
months, constrained the German scholar, 
Heyne, to allow himself no more than two 
nights of weekly rest, that he might complete 
his perusal of the old Greek authors. And it 
was scientific fervour which dragged the lazy 
but eloquent French naturalist, Buffon, from 
beloved slumbers to his still more beloved 
studies, for many years together. There is no 



62 



A Fervent Spirit. 



department of human distinction which cannot 
record its feats of fervour. But shall science, 
with its corruptible crowns, and the world, with 
its vanities, monopolise this enthusiasm ? If 
not, let each one consider, What is the greatest 
self-denial to which a godly zeal has prompted 
me ? Which is the largest or the greatest work 
through which a holy fervour has ever carried 
me?* 

* It v/ould have been right, had there been room, to men- 
tion some things which are detrimental or fatal to fervour of 
spirit : — i. Guilt on the conscience. 2. Debt, and worldly 
entanglements. 3. Sabbaths not sanctified. 4. Late and 
frequent visiting. 5. Indulgence in frivolous literature. 
6. Restraining prayer. 7. A wrong theology. 



* 




LECTURE V. 



THE THREEFOLD CORD. 



" Not slothfiil in business; fervent in spirit; 
Lord." — Rom. xii. n. 



ving the 



Were you ever struck with the sobriety of 
Scripture? . There are many good thoughts 
in human compositions, and many hints of 
truth in human systems ; but in proportion as 
they are original or striking, they border on 
extravagance. You cannot follow them fully 
till you find yourself toppling on the verge of a 
paradox, or are obliged to halt in the midst of 
a glaring absurdity. There are many excellent 
ideas in the old philosophy, and some valuable 
principles in the ethics of later schools ; but 
they all shew, though it were in nothing but 
their extremeness, their frail original, their 
human infirmity, their wrong-side bias. And 
so is it with many religious systems, built on 
insulated texts of Scripture. They are sot 



64 The Threefold Cord. 

without a basis of truth, but that basis 
is partial. The extremeness of religionism 
pounces on a single text, or a single class of 
texts, and walls them off from the rest of revela- 
tion, and cultivates them exclusively, — bestows 
on them the irrigation of constant study, and 
reaps no harvests except those which grow on 
this favourite territory, — and looks on all the 
rest of the Bible as a sort of common, an un- 
enclosed waste, a territory good for little or 
nothing, except a short occasional excursion ; 
ay, and perhaps frowns on another class of 
texts with a secret jealousy, as texts which had 
better never have been there, a dangerous 
group, whose creeping roots or wafted seeds 
threaten evil to the enclosure of their own 
favourite little system. If the texts so treated 
be doctrinal, the result of this partiality, this 
exclusiveness or extremeness, is sectarianism ; 
if the texts so treated be practical, the result 
is religious singularity. But sectarianism of 
doctrine and singularity of practice, whatever 
countenance they get from single clauses and . 
detached sentences of Scripture, are contra- 
dicted and condemned the moment you con- 
front them with the complete Bible. Hence 
it happens, that whilst there never was a 
doctrinal or practical error which had not 
some text to stand upon, there never was one 
which dared encounter openly and honestly the 



Sobriety of Scripture. 65 

entire Word of God. In other words, there 
has seldom been an error which did not include 
some important truth ; but just as surely as it 
included some truth, so it excluded others. 
And just as oxygen alone will never make the 
atmosphere, or hydrogen alone will never make 
the ocean, or red beams alone will never make 
the sun, so one fact, or one set of ideas, will 
never make the truth. A truth, by abiding 
alone, becomes to all intents an error. 

Nothing can be more different from the 
partiality of man than the completeness and 
comprehensiveness of Scripture. Nothing can 
be more opposed to man's extremeness than 
the sobriety of Scripture. It does not deal in 
hyperbole or paradox : it puts the truth, calmly, 
fully, and in all its goodly proportions. Unlike 
the systems of man's invention, its ethics do 
not flutter on the solitary wing of one only 
virtue, nor do they limp along on the uneven 
legs of a short theology and a long morality. 
Its philanthropy does not consist in hating 
yourself, nor does its love to God require you to 
forget your brother. Its perfection of character 
is not pre-eminence in one particular, nor does 
it inculcate any excellence which requires the 
annihilation of all the rest. Though neither a 
see-saw of counterpoising virtues and vices, nor 
a neutral mixture of opposing elements, there 
is a balance of excellence, a blending of graces, 
E 



66 The i hreef old Cord. 

in the gospel ideal of character. It forgets 
neither the man himself, nor the God above 
him, nor the world around him. It teaches us 
to live godly, but it does not forget to teach 
us to live righteously and soberly. It urges 
diligence in business, but it does not omit to 
enjoin fervour of spirit and devotedness to the 
Lord. 

I do not know that we can select a more 
opportune exemplification of these contrary 
principles, — the partiality of human religion 
and the comprehensiveness of scriptural re- 
ligion, — than the text with which you are now 
so familiar, and the treatment which its several 
precepts have received at the hands of men. I 
think it may be very easily shewn that each 
separate clause has been the motto of a several 
sect, the watchword of a separate party : each 
right, so far as it remembered that special 
clause — each wrong, so far as it forgot the other 
two. 

i. First, " Not slothful in business." There 
have been in all ages those who were very 
willing to sum up religion in discharging the 
duties of their calling. If they were servants, 
they were conscious of great industry, and a 
real attention to their employers' interest. If 
wives or mothers, they were notable for keeping 
at home, and caring for their own concerns. 
They looked well to the ways of their household, 



Hard Work. 67 

and ate not the bread of idleness ; and could 
the trim threshold and each tidy arrangement 
of the well-ordered dwelling tell the full tale of 
anxious thoughts, and early rising, and worry- 
ing bustle, which have been expended upon 
them, happy the empire which had such prime 
minister as rules this little realm. If men of 
business, they feel that they are busy men. 
They mind their own affairs, and do not inter- 
fere in other men's matters. They are at it late 
and early ; the summer sun does not seduce 
them from their dingy counting-room, nor do 
the amenities of literature bewitch them from 
the anxieties of money-making. They seldom 
treat themselves to a holiday, and, what is more 
to the purpose, they do not despatch business 
by halves ; they work in good earnest. They 
feel as if the chief end of man lay somewhere 
about the terminus of their own trade or pro- 
fession, and they push on accordingly. Then 
there mingles with it all a complacent feeling. 
"It is not for myself I thus tug and strive, and 
grow prematurely old ; it is for others. ' He 
that provides not for his own house, hath denied 
the faith, and is wore than an infidel.' ' If any 
man will not work, neither let him eat.' We are 
commanded to redeem the time, and are for- 
bidden to be slothful in business." And if to 
this again should be superadded a certain 
amount of overt and ostensible religion, — if this 



68 The Threefold Cord. 

busy man or cumbered housekeeper should 
withal read a daily chapter, and maintain the 
regular form of family worship, and the equally 
regular form of church-going, — above all, if his 
business should prosper, and nothing occur to 
vex his conscience, he is very apt to feel, " What 
lack I yet ? True, I pretend to no peculiar 
sanctity ; but I believe I am as honest and in- 
dustrious and sober as those who do. I may 
not get into the raptures into which some try to 
work themselves, nor do I fuss about from ser- 
mon to sermon and from meeting to meeting, as 
many do ; but I believe my respect for religion 
is as real, and my intentions as good as theirs. 
And though I do not lay the same stress on 
speculative points and matters of faith, no 
man can accuse me of neglecting the weightier 
matters of the law." Now, the industrious 
element in this character is good, but if this be 
the whole of it, in the Bible balance it will be 
found deplorably wanting. A man may be all 
that you describe yourself, without being born 
again. He may be all this, and his heart never 
have been made right with God ; and of all the 
work he has done so heartily, nothing may have 
been done as unto the Lord, — in the animation 
of that love, and in the singleness of that loyalty, 
without which the most fagging toil is but an 
earnest self-idolatry. And he may be all this 
without any of that fervour of spirit which will 



Warm Feeling. 69 

make a man happy in that world, where the 
things of our present faith are the visible sources 
of joy, and where praise and adoration and the 
other out-pourings of ecstatic hearts are the 
exercises most congenial. 

2. But then, again, " fervent in spirit." Others 
have erred in subliming the whole of Christian- 
ity into fervour. They fancy that there is no 
outlet for piety except in emotion. They forget 
that the engine may be doing most work when 
none of the steam is blowing off ; and therefore 
they are not content except they _/£<?/ a great deal, 
and live in constant excitement. They forget 
that the best form that feeling can take is the 
practical form, the praying, praising, working 
form. Or if it should take this form, their 
fervour is ill-directed. It is not fairly distributed ; 
they are fervent in secret or in the sanctuary, 
but not fervent in society ; they are fervent in 
controversies, but not in truths conceded ; they 
are fervent in the things of their own denomina- 
tion, but not in the things of Jesus Christ ; or 
if fervent in His cause, they fix on the fields of 
labour far away, and contemn those nearer home. 
Their fervour is reserved for hallowed places and 
devotional hours, and does not pervade their 
daily life. They will rise from a prayer in which 
they have expatiated on the glory of the latter 
day,- — " Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on 
earth as it is in heaven," and some ordinary 



yo The Threefold Cord. 

duty is awaiting them ; they are asked to fulfil 
some prosaic service, to engage in some such 
matter-of-fact beneficence as angels in heaven 
are apt to do ; and the sight of actual labour 
disperses their good frame in a moment : their 
praying fervour is not a working fervour. Or 
they have just been singing, under some extra- 
ordinary afflatus, a hymn about universal peace 
or millennial glory ; but the unopened letter 
turns out to be a despatch from some nefarious 
correspondent, or the moment the worship is 
over some gross negligence or some provoking 
carelessness accosts them, and the instant ex- 
plosion proves that were they living in the 
millennium, there would be at least one excep- 
tion to the universal peace. Or they have come 
back from some jubilant missionary meeting, 
where their hearts were really warm, where they 
loudly cheered the speeches, and where their 
eyes tingled at the recital of some affecting 
instance of liberality ; and they are hardly safe 
in their homes^ when the inopportune collector 
assails them, and they are asked for the solid 
sympathy of their substance. Yes ; O igno- 
miny ; O bathos ! after they have given their 
tears, asked for their gold ! And they feel as 
if it were a fatal transition, a most headlong 
climaxj from delicious emotion down to vulgar 
money. And thus it is that they continue to let 
as much feeling vanish in inaction, as much 



The Recluse. 71 

fervour fly off in mere emotion, as, if turned on 
in the right direction, might have propelled 
some mighty enterprise, or conducted to a safe 
and joyful conclusion many a work of faith and 
labour of love. 

3. "Serving the Lord." In Old-Testament 
times it was not unusual for persons of eminent 
piety to dedicate themselves entirely to temple- 
service, waiting on God in prayer continually 
night and day. Thus Samuel was dedicated to 
the Lord all the days of his life ; so we presume 
was the maid of Gilead, Jephthah's daughter ; 
and so was Anna the prophetess, who departed 
not from the temple the eighty-four years of her 
long widowhood. In seeking this seclusion they 
were practically carrying out the Psalmist's de- 
vout behest, " One thing have I desired of the 
Lord, that will I seek after ; that I may dwell in 
the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to 
behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire 
in his temple." And a pleasant life it were, away 
from a stormy world in the calm pavilion of God's 
own presence, and away from the tantalizing 
phantoms, vexing cares, and stunning noise of 
delirious mortality, — to see no beauty less soul- 
filling than His own, and hear no voice less 
assuring than His who says, " My peace I give 
unto you." But the gospel dispensation is not 
the era of anchorets and recluses and temple- 
devotees ; or, more properly speaking, every 



72 The Threefold Cord. 

disciple of the Saviour ought to be alike a de- 
votee. He should live not to himself, but to 
Him who loved him. He should be a self- 
devoted, a dedicated man ; a living sacrifice, 
but a sacrifice diffusing its sweet savour in the 
scenes of ordinary life, and regaling not heaven 
alone, but earth with its grateful exhalations. 
He should seek to behold his Lord's beauty and 
dwell in his Lord's presence all the days of his 
life ; but now that neither Jerusalem nor Sama- 
ria is the temple, his believing heart should be 
the shrine, and his ascending Saviour's pro- 
mise, " Lo, I am with you," should be the 
Shekinah. Wherever he goes, he should carry 
his Lord's presence along with him, and what- 
ever he is doing he should be doing his heavenly 
Master's work. However, this life of active de- 
votedness does not suit the taste of many. In 
order to serve the Lord they feel that they must 
leave the living world. They must off and away 
to some cleft of the rock, some lodge of the far 
wilderness, some 

" sacred solitude, 
" Where Quiet with Religion makes her home." 

To be diligent in business they feel incompat- 
ible with serving the Lord ; and even that more 
hallowed business which is occupied with minis- 
tering to the bodies and souls of men, is a rude 
break in their retirement, a jar in their contem- 
plative joys. They would rather be excused 



Jonah, 73 

from anything which forces them into contact 
with unwelcome flesh and blood, and reminds 
them of this selfish world and its gross material- 
ism. Their closet is more attractive than the 
cottage of poverty ; meditations of the rest 
which remaineth are more congenial than toils 
in the work of the day ; and pensive lamenta- 
tions over the world's wickedness come more 
spontaneous than real earnest efforts to make 
this bad world better. Now it is impossible to 
be too devoted if that devotedness make you 
correspondently fervent in spirit and diligent in 
business. You cannot pray too much, though 
you should pray without ceasing, if your prayer 
take a practical direction, and lead you to do 
good without ceasing. But it is just as possible 
to run away from the Lord's service by running 
into retirement as by running into the world. 
In the retirement of the ship, and then in the 
completer retirement of the whale's belly, Jonah 
was as much a rebel and a runaway as in the 
noisy streets of Joppa. Had he wished to 
" serve the Lord," his " business " was to have 
been at Nineveh. And it little matters whether 
it be the recluse of the desert, who absconds 
from his brethren, and leaves the sick to tend 
themselves, and the ignorant to teach them- 
selves, and the careless to convert themselves ; 
or the recluse of the closet, who leaves the ne- 
glected household to take care of itself, the slip- 



74 The Threefold Cord. 

shod children to look after themselves, and the 
broken furniture to mend itself ; each in his own 
way is slothful in business, under a self-deceiv- 
ing pretext that he is serving the Lord. 

Thus you perceive that each of the three 
classes, the mere bustlers, the mere feelers, 
and the mere devotees, by being right in only 
one thing are altogether wrong. These are not 
fancy sketches, nor are they studies after the 
antique. True, you may find the counterpart 
of the first class in the correct morality and 
heartless formalism of that worldly professor- 
ship, that " Whole-Duty-of-Man" pharisaism 
which once abounded in these very lands. And 
you may represent the second by that Antino- 
mian fervour, that unproductive zeal which has 
marked some periods of the Church, which pos- 
sibly marks some sections still. And you will 
find the third exemplified in all the mystic devo- 
tion and day-dreaming quietism of world-weary 
recluses, Popish and Protestant, in every age. 
Though all can quote one fragment of this text, 
all are wrong by not being able to quote the 
whole. Those who are diligent in business, but 
in that business do not serve the Lord, their 
selfish diligence is but a busy idleness, a hypo- 
critical activity. Their time-bounded and self- 
reverting work is the ineffectual labour of the 
convict who digs the pit and fills it up again, 
who draws water from the well and pours it 



The Runaway Engi?ie. 75 

back again. And so the devotedness which 
results in no diligence is like the planning of a 
house which is never built, the daily purposing 
of a journey which is never set about. The 
fervour of spirit which, withal, is slothful in 
business, is like the stream falling on the mill- 
wheel, but the connecting shaft is broken, and 
though the wheel turns nimbly round, the de- 
tached machinery stands still, and no work is 
done ; or like the disconnected engine and ten- 
der, which bolt away by themselves, and leave 
the helpless train still standing where it stood. 

Now, in opposition to all these defective 
versions, these maimed and truncated repre- 
sentations, this verse delineates the Christian 
character in its completeness, hard-working, 
warmly-feeling, single-eyed ; " not slothful in 
business," "fervent in spirit," "serving the 
Lord." And if you look at the Christian philo- 
sophy of the subject, you will find that it is the 
single eye which awakes the fervent spirit, and 
the fervent spirit which sets the busy hands and 
feet in willing motion. 

1. It is an eye fixed on Jesus which kindles 
the fervent spirit. An unconverted man is not 
happy. There is a dull load on his spirit — a 
dim cloud on his conscience ; he scarcely knows 
what he would be at — but he certainly is not 
happy. If a considerate man, he is aware that 
there must be a joy in existence which he has 



y6 The Threefold Cord. 

not yet struck out — a secret of more solid bliss 
which he hitherto has not hit upon. He is not 
at peace with God. He has not secured an 
explicit reconciliation with his Creator and 
Sovereign. God's frown is upon him, a frown 
as wide as is the sinner's universe. Go where 
he may, he cannot get out into the clear day- 
light of a glad conscience and a propitious 
heaven. And it is not till he finds his way into 
the Goshen of the gospel, the sun-lit region on 
which the beams of God's countenance still 
smile down, through the doorway by which an 
ascending Saviour entered heaven ; it is not till, 
from the gross darkness and palpable gloom of 
a natural condition, a man is led into the grate- 
ful light and glorious liberty of the sons of God ; 
it is not till then that he knows the ecstasy pf 
undiluted joy and the perfection of that peace 
which passeth all understanding. It is not till 
the Spirit of adoption makes him a child of God 
that he thoroughly feels himself a man ; and it 
is in the sweet sense of forgiveness, and in the 
transporting assurance that he is now on the 
same side with Omnipotence, that he first 
breathes freely. The thrill of a sudden anima- 
tion sweeps through all his frame ; and, en- 
countering an unwonted gaiety all around him, 
he perceives an unwonted energy within him. 
Peace with God has brought him power from 
God, and with the Lord he loves to dictate his 



Christ the Sunshine of Life. jy 

work ; there is nothing which he is loth to do, 
and with the Lord upon his side, nothing which 
he cannot hope to do. The convict-labour and 
hireling-tasks of the alien and bondsman are 
exchanged for the freewill offerings and affec- 
tionate services of a son and a disciple. Recon- 
ciled to God, he is reconciled to everything 
which comes from God ; and full of the love of 
Christ, he courts everything which he can do 
for Christ. " Come, labour, for I rather love 
thee now. Come, hard work and long work, I 
am in a mood for you now. Come, trials and 
crosses, for I can carry you now. Come, death, 
for I am ready for thee now." His relation to 
Christ has put him in a new relation to everything 
else ; and the same fountain which has washed 
the stain from his conscience having washed 
the scales from his eyes, an inundation of light 
and of beauty bursts in from the creation around 
him, which hitherto was to him as much an un- 
known universe as its Creator was the unknown 
God ; and the boundless inflowings of peaceful 
images, and happy impressions, and strong 
consolations dilate his soul with an elasticity, 
an enterprise and courage as new as they are 
divine. He has found a Saviour, and his soul 
is happy. The Lord Jesus is his friend ; and 
his spirit, once so frigid, is become a fervent 
spirit. His new views have made him a new 
man. 



78 The Threefold Cord. 

2. The fervent spirit creates the industrious 
life. Sulky labour and the labour of sorrow are 
little worth. Whatever a man does with a guilty 
feeling he is apt to do wrong ; and whatever he 
does with a melancholy feeling he is likely to do 
by halves. Look to that little boy sitting down 
to his hated lesson after a burst of passion. Do 
you notice how long the same page lies open 
before the pouting student, and how solemnly 
he watches the blue-bottle raging round the 
room and bouncing against the window ? Look 
at his blurred copy-book, its trembling strokes 
and blotted loops, a memento of this angry 
morning. And the sum upon the slate, only 
here and there a figure right, an emblem of his 
rebellious mind, all at sixes and sevens with 
itself. It is guilt that makes him a trifler. 
It is guilt that makes him blunder. Guilt 
makes him wretched ; and therefore all he does 
is wrong. But, sometimes, grief disables or 
disinclines for exertion as much as guilt. You 
may remember times when such a sorrow pos- 
sessed you, that you not only forgot to eat your 
daily bread, but had no heart to do your daily 
work. You did not care to set your house in 
order ; for some stunning intelligence or fearful 
foreboding had paralysed your energy. You did 
not care to hear your children's tasks ; for the 
shadows of yonder sick-room had diffused a 
look of orphanage on them and on everything. 



Guilt and Gloom. 79 

And the more delightsome the recreation once 
had been, the more congenial the labour, so 
much the deeper was the funeral dye it had now 
imbibed, and the more did your heart revolt 
from it. Sorrow makes the eyes heavy, even 
when they cannot sleep ; and, for inefficiency, 
next to the blundering work of a guilty con- 
science, is the dull work of a weary or wounded 
spirit. If you could only shed tranquillity over 
the conscience, and infuse joy into the soul, you 
would do more to make the man a thorough 
worker than if you could lend him the force of 
Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus. 
Now, the gospel freely admitted makes the man 
happy. It gives him peace with God and 
makes him happy in God. Its strong consola- 
tion neutralises the sting of reluctant labour and 
the curse of penal toil. Its advent of heavenly 
energy takes the languor out of life, and much 
of its inherent indolence out of lazy human 
nature. It chases spectres from the fancy and 
lions from the street. It gives industry a noble 
look which selfish drudgery never wore ; and 
from the moment that a man begins to do his 
work for his . Saviour's sake, he feels that the 
most ordinary employments are full of sweetness 
and dignity ; and that the most difficult are not 
impossible. " Through Christ strengthening me 
I can do all things." Even in the affairs of 
ordinary life, the best — the most beautiful and 



80 The Threefold Cord. 

effective work which a man can do is full-hearted 
work; the clever, conclusive, tasteful work 
which quits the masterly hands or the invigo- 
rated mind of him whose heart is glad. And if 
any one of you, my friends, is weary with his 
work ; if dissatisfaction with yourself, or sorrow 
of any kind, disheartens you ; if, at any time, 
you feel the dull paralysis of conscious sin, or 
the depressing influence of vexing thoughts, 
look to Jesus and be happy. Be happy, and 
your joyful work will prosper well. 




LECTURE VI. 



A WORD TO EACH AND TO ALL.— CONCLUSION. 



" Not slothful in business ; fervent in spirit ,' serving 
the Lord:' — Rom. xii. n. 



Christian industry is just the outlet of a fer- 
vent spirit, a Christ-devoted heart. The in- 
dustry which is not fervent is not Christian, 
and, on the other hand, the love which does 
not come forth in action, the fervour which 
does not lead to diligence, will soon die down. 
He who has an eye to Christ in all he does, and 
whose spirit is full of that energy, that love to 
his work and his brethren and his Master in 
heaven, which the Holy Spirit gives, will not 
soon weary in well-doing. 

i. Some of you are servants. Some of you 
are in families where there is no fear of God, 
and some of you serve employers who take no 
interest in you, who, however hard you toil, and 
however well you do your work, never thank 

F 



82 A Word to All. 

you, or notice your exertions. This is dis- 
couraging ; but before you entered that family, 
had you not entered the service of the Lord 
Jesus Christ ? and when you came to this new- 
place you surely did not leave this higher and 
nobler service. Very true, the individual from 
whom you receive your immediate orders may 
be very unreasonable, and exceedingly unami- 
able, and the thanks you get may be sorry 
remuneration for your conscientious industry. 
But have you not a Master in heaven, whose 
eye is always upon you, who takes interested 
note of all you do, and who, whatever you do in 
secret for His sake, will reward you openly ? 
You do not mean to say that all your end in 
working is to get so much wages, with a kind 
word or a look of approval now and then ? If 
you carry the spirit of discipleship into your 
every-day duties, you will find that there is a 
way to make the meanest occupation honour- 
able, and the most irksome employment easy. 
Work which you do for the Lord's sake will 
never be wearisome ; and however little man 
may notice or acknowledge it, your labour in 
the Lord will never be in vain. And I know 
not if there be any department of life where 
there is more abundant room for a truly Chris- 
tian ambition than the calling which you occupy. 
Whether, like Eliezer of Damascus, you serve a 
Father of the Faithful, or, like Joseph and the 



The Little Maid. 



83 



Israelitish maid, be in the household of a Pagan 
or a worldling ; you have singular opportuni- 
ties for adorning the doctrine of your God and 
Saviour. Good man as Abraham was, and good 
man as Eliezer was, there was once a time when 
Abraham, in a tone of evident disappointment 
said, " Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, 
and lo, one born . in my house is mine heir." 
But so completely had the consistent kindness 
and fidelity of Eliezer won the affection of his 
chief, that at the last Abraham could scarcely 
have wished a better heir than his servant, or 
Eliezer found a more indulgent father than his 
master. Joseph had no motive for serving 
Pharaoh, except that anxiety to fulfil an im- 
portant office well, and that hearty love of labour 
which distinguish men of a healthy mind and 
conscientious spirit. But such a zealous charge 
did he take of Pharaoh's interests, so intelli- 
gently and sleeplessly did his eye travel through 
the realm, that Egypt wore another aspect under 
Joseph's rule, and its revenues became as rich 
as a provident and benignant administration 
could make them. The little maid of Israel 
was a captive, and if the joy of the Lord had 
not been her strength, she would have had no 
spirit to work. She would have pined after her 
home among the hills of Samaria ; and when 
she thought of the pleasant cottage from which 
fierce ruffians had torn her away, and named 



84 A Word to All. 

over to herself, one by one, the playfellows whom 
she would never see again, she would have 
broken her young heart and sat down in sulky 
silence, or perhaps have died. But she loved 
the Lord God of Israel ; and as He had sent her 
to Damascus and into the house of a heathen 
lady, she made up her mind and set to work 
right earnestly, and soon got on to take a real 
interest in her new abode. She loved her mis- 
tress and was sorry for the deplorable sufferings 
of her afflicted lord, and suggested the visit to 
Elisha which resulted in his wondrous cure. 
And both Joseph and the little maid, by serving 
the Lord with a fervent spirit, not only made 
their own life pass pleasantly in a foreign land, 
but they made a great impression on those 
around them. Joseph's God was magnified in 
the eyes of Pharaoh, and the little maid soon 
saw Naaman a worshipper of the true Jehovah. 
And you who are in the service of others, seek 
to serve the Lord. Perhaps, like Joseph and 
the little maid, you are far from home. Perhaps, 
like them, you are doing work for those in whom 
you had no interest formerly, and who even now 
have not the fear of God before them. But your 
Lord paramount is the Lord Jesus himself ; the 
real Master who has sent you here and given 
you this up-hill work to do is Christ ; and if you 
only set about it for His sake, with a happy, in- 
terested, resolute mind, your work will grow 



The Scholar. 85 

every day easier ; your conscience will sing ; 
the light of the Lord's presence will gild the dim 
passages and stranger-looking chambers of your 
place of sojourn ; your character will ere long 
commend itself, and, better still, may commend 
your Master in heaven. " For he that in these 
things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and 
approved of men." 

2. Some of you are scholars, either receiving 
the education which fits for ordinary life, or 
which may qualify you for some particular pro- 
fession. Here, too, you have need of industry. 
I hope you love learning for its own sake ; I hope 
you love it still more for the Lord's sake. The 
more things you know and the more things you 
can do, the more respected, and consequently 
the more influential and useful you will hereafter 
be. If you grow up an ignorant man, few will 
care for your company. People will be laughing 
at your mistakes and your blunders. And even 
if you should be wishful to do good, you will 
scarcely know how to set about it. The useful- 
ness and happiness of your future life depend 
very much on the amount of solid learning and 
graceful accomplishments, and, above all, on the 
extent of Bible knowledge which you presently 
acquire ; and if you be only willing, you may ac- 
quire as much as ever you please. To use the 
words of the most philosophic of British artists, 
" Nothing is denied to well-directed diligence." 



86 A Word to All 

Long ago, a little boy was entered at Harrow 
School. He was put into a class beyond his 
years, and where all the scholars had the advan- 
tage of previous instruction, denied to him. His 
master chid him for his dulness, and all his own 
efforts could not raise him from the lowest place 
on the form. But, nothing daunted, he procured 
the grammars and other elementary books which 
his class-fellows had gone through in previous 
terms. He devoted the hours of play, and not 
a few of the hours of sleep, to the mastering of 
these ; till in a few weeks he gradually began to 
rise, and it was not long till he shot far ahead of 
all his companions, and became not only dux of 
that division, but the pride of Harrow. That 
boy, whose career began with this fit of energetic 
application, you may see his statue in St Paul's 
Cathedral to-morrow ; for he lived to be the 
greatest Oriental scholar of modern Europe, and 
most of you have heard the name of Sir William 
Jones. God denies nothing in the way of learn- 
ing to well-directed diligence. It is possible that 
you may be rather depressed than stimulated 
when asked to contemplate some first-rate name 
in literature or science. When you see the lofty 
pinnacle of attainment on which that name is 
now reposing, you feel as if it had been created 
there rather than had travelled thither. No 
such thing. The most illustrious in the annals 
of philosophy, once on a time, knew no more of 



Newton. 87 

it than you now do. And how did he arrive at 
his peerless proficiency? By dint of diligence; 
by downright painstaking. When Newton was 
asked how he came by those discoveries which 
looked like divination or intuitions of a higher 
intelligence rather than the results of mere re- 
search, he declared that he could not otherwise 
account for them unless it were that he could 
pay longer attention to the subject than most 
men cared to do. In other words, it was by 
diligence in his business that he became the 
most renowned of British sages. The discovery 
of gravitation, the grand secret of the universe, 
was not whispered in his ear by any oracle. It 
did not drop into his idle lap a windfall from the 
clouds. But he reached it by self-denying toil, 
by midnight study, by the large command of 
accurate science, and by bending all his powers 
of mind in the one direction, and keeping them 
thus bent. And whatever may be the subject 
of your pursuit, if you have any natural aptitude 
for it at all, there is no limit to your proficiency 
except the limits of your own painstaking. 
There is no wishing-cap which will fetch you 
knowledge from the east or west. It is not 
likely to visit you in a morning dream, nor will 
it drop through your study roof into your elbow- 
chair. It is not a lucky advent which will alight 
on your loitering path some twilight, like Mi- 
nerva's owl, and create you an orator, an artist, 



88 A Word to All 

or a scholar on the spot. It is an ultimatum 
which you must make up your mind that it is 
worth your while attaining ; and trudge on 
steadily towards it, and not count that day's 
work hard, nor that night-watching long, which 
advances you one step towards it, or brings its 
welcoming beacon one bright hope nearer. 

3. Some of you are teachers. It is much to 
be lamented that there are so few enthusiasts in 
this honourable and important work. Many 
who are engaged in it regard it as a bondage, 
and sigh for the day which shall finally release 
them from its drudgery and din. They have 
never felt that theirs is a high calling, nor do 
they ever enter the school-room with the inspir- 
ing consciousness that they go as missionaries 
and pastors there. They undervalue their schol- 
ars. Instead of regarding them as all that now 
exists of a generation as important as our own ; 
instead of recognising in their present disposi- 
tions the mischief or beneficence which must 
tell on wide neighbourhoods ere a few short 
years are run ; instead of training up immortal 
spirits and expansive minds for usefulness now 
and glory afterwards, many teachers have never 
seen their pupils in any other light than as so 
many rows of turbulent rebels, a rabble of ne- 
cessary torments, a roomful of that mighty plague 
with which the Nile of our noisy humanity is all 
croaking and jumping over. And many under- 



The Teacher. 89 

value themselves. Instead of recollecting their 
glorious vocation, and eyeing the cloud of teacher- 
witnesses with whom they are encompassed; 
instead of a high-souled zeal for their profession, 
as that which should form the plastic mind after 
the finest models of human attainment and 
scriptural excellence, many regard their office as 
so menial that they have always the feeling as if 
themselves were pedants. To prescribe the task, 
to hear the lesson, to administer monotonous 
praise and blame, is the listless round of their 
official perfunctoriness. But there are few fields 
of brighter promise than the calling of a teacher. 
If he give himself wholly to it, if he set before him 
the highest object of all tuition, the bringing 
souls to Christ ; if he can form a real affection 
for his scholars, and maintain a parental anxiety 
for their proficiency and their principles ; if he 
has wisdom enough to understand them, and 
kindness enough to sympathise with them ; if he 
has sufficient love for learning to have no dis- 
taste for lessons, he will be sure to inspire a zeal 
for study into the minds of many, he will win 
the love of all except the very few whose hearts 
are deaf-born, and in a short time the best fea- 
tures of his own character will be multiplying in 
spheres far-sundered, in the kindred persons of 
grateful pupils. Should he live long enough, 
they will praise him in the gate of public life, or 
cheer his declining days in the homes which he 



90 A Word to AIL 

taught them to make happy. Or should he die 
soon enough, the rest from his labours will ever 
and anon be heightened by the arrival of another 
and another of the children whom God hath 
given him.* 

But without descending to more minute par- 
ticulars, let me remind you, my friends, that all 
of you who are members of this Church have 
got a special " business " as the professed dis- 
ciples of Jesus Christ. In the day when Christ 
said to you, " Arise, follow me," he called you 
to a life like His own, a life of industry and self- 
denial, and continual doing good. You are a con- 
sistent Christian in proportion as you resemble 
Him whose fervent^ spirit flowed forth not more 
in His midnight prayers than in His daily deeds 
of mercy, and who, whether He disputed with the 
doctors in the temple, or conversed with the 
ignorant stranger at the well, or fed the five 
thousand with miraculous loaves, or summoned 
Lazarus from the tomb, was still about his 
Father's "business." They little understand 
the Christian life, who fancy that a slothful or 
languid profession will secure an abundant en- 
trance into the heavenly kingdom. If the be- 
liever's progress from the cross to the crown be, 
as it is again and again represented, a race, a 
wrestling, a warfare, a fight, a continual watch- 
ing, and a constant violence, there^ good reason 

* See Note B. 



Diligence. 91 

for the exhortations, " Give diligence to make 
your calling and election sure." " We desire 
that every one of you do shew diligence to 
the full assurance of hope unto the end ; that 
ye be not slothful^ but followers of them who 
through faith and patience inherit the pro- 
mises." "Wherefore, brethren, seeing that you 
look for such things, be diligent that you may 
be found of Him in peace, without spot, and 
blameless." 

It needs diligence to keep the conscience clean : 
" Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a 
conscience void of offence toward God and to- 
ward men." It needs diligence to keep up a 
happy hopefulness of spirit : " Gird up the 
loins of your mind, berimyer, and hope to the 
end." It needs diligence to maintain a serene 
and strenuous orthodoxy : " Watch ye ; stand 
fast in the faith ; quit you like men ; be strong." 
It needs diligence to maintain a blameless life : 
" Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving 
against sin." It 'needs diligence to lead a life 
conspicuously useful and God-glorifying : " See- 
ing we are compassed about with so great a cloud 
of witnesses, (a$ Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and 
Abraham, ani Moses,) let us lay aside every 
weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset 
us, and let us run with patience the race that is 
set before us, looking unto Jesus." And it needs 
diligence to attain a joyful welcome from Jesus 



92 A Word to All. 

and a full reward : " And besides this, giving all 
diligence, add to your faith, virtue (fortitude) ; 
and to fortitude, knowledge ; and to knowledge, 
temperance ; and to temperance, patience ; and 
to patience, godliness ; and to godliness, bro- 
therly-kindness ; and to brotherly-kindness, 
charity. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give 
diligence to make your calling and election 
sure ; for if ye do these things (fortitude, &c.) 
ye shall never fall ; for so an entrance shall be 
ministered unto you abundantly into the ever- 
lasting kingdom of our God and Saviour Jesus 
Christ." " And I heard a voice from heaven 
saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead 
which die in the Lord from henceforth : yea, 
saith the Spirit, that they may rest from 
their labours, and their works do follow them." 
" Let us labour, therefore, to enter into that 
rest." * 

To labour in the word and doctrine is the 
business of one ; to feed the flock of God and 
rule the Church of Christ is the business of 
others : to " serve tables," to care for and 
comfort the poor, and see that all things be 
done decently and in order, is the business of 
yet others ; to teach the young and instruct the 
ignorant is the business of some ; and to train 
up their households in the nurture and admoni- 
tion of the Lord is the business of others ; to 

* 2 Pet. i. 5-7, 10, n ; Rev. xiv. 13 ; Heb. iv. 11. 



The Lorcfs Service. 93 

obey their parents, and to grow in wisdom — 
in favour with God and man — is the business of 
many ; and to do work for others, with a willing 
hand and a single eye, is the business of many 
more. The work of the day needs diligence ; 
much more does the work of eternity. It needs 
fervent diligence to be constantly serving our 
fellows ; and it needs no less diligence to be 
directly serving Christ. To tend the sick, to 
visit the widows and fatherless in their afflic- 
tion, to frequent the abodes of insulated 
wretchedness or congregated depravity, to set 
on foot schemes of Christian benevolence, and, 
still more, to keep them going — all this needs 
diligence. To put earnestness into secret 
prayer ; to offer petitions so emphatic and 
express, that they are remembered afterwards, 
and the answer watched for and expected ; to 
commune with one's own heart, so as to attain 
some real self-acquaintance ; to get into that 
humble, contrite, confessing frame, where the 
soul feels it sweet to lie beneath the cross, and 
"a debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy 
to sing ; " to stir up one's soul to a thank- 
ful praising pitch ; to beat down murmuring 
thoughts, and drive vexing thoughts away ; to 
get assurance regarding the foundations of the 
faith, and clear views of the truth itself ; to have 
a prompt and secure command of Scripture, to 
possess a large acquaintance with the great sal- 



94 A Word to All. 

vation, and a minute acquaintance with all the 
details of Christian duty ; all this needs no less 
diligence on our part, because God must give it 
or we shall never shew it. To put life into fa- 
mily worship ; to make it more than a duteous 
routine ; to make its brief episode of praise and 
prayer and Bible-reading a refreshful ordinance, 
and influential on the day ; to give a salutary 
direction to social intercourse, and season with 
timely salt the conversation of the friendly circle ; 
to drive that " torpid ass," * the body, to scenes 
of duty difficult and long-adjourned ; to make a 
real business of public worship ; to scowl away 
all pretexts for forsaking the solemn assembly ; 
to spirit the reluctant flesh into a punctual 
arrival at the house of prayer, and then to stir 
up the soul to a cordial participation in all its 
services ; to accompany with alert and affec- 
tionate eyes the reading of God's Word, and 
listen with wakeful ear to the exposition and 
application of its lively oracles ; to contribute 
a tuneful voice and a singing heart to our New 
Testament offering of praise, and to put the 
whole stress of an intelligent and sympathising 
and believing earnestness into the supplications 
of the sanctuary, so that each petition shall as- 
cend to the throne of grace with the deliberate 
signature of our Amen ; — all this requires a dili- 
gence, none the less because unless God work 

* Calvin on the text. 



Motives. 95 

it in us, we shall never of ourselves muster up 
sufficient fervour thus to serve the Lord. 

Dear brethren and Christian friends, consider 
what I say. There is little time to apply it ; but 
you have heard from this text some hints of im- 
portant truth — apply them for yourselves. As 
reasons why we desire to see a Church more in- 
dustrious and not less fervent and unworldly than 
the Church has usually been, and as motives 
why each right-hearted man among you should 
this night start afresh on a career of busy devoted- 
ness and fervent industry, let me remind you, 

i. Herein is the Father glorified, that ye bear 
much fruit. 

2. Herein will you truly resemble, and in 
measure re-exhibit the character of your blessed 
Lord and Master. 

3. Hereby will yourselves be made far happier. 

4. Hereby will the world be the better for 
your sojourn in it. 

5. Hereby will the sadness of your departure 
be exceedingly alleviated. 

6. And hereby will your everlasting joy be 
unspeakably enhanced. 

Forbearing to dwell on these different con- 
siderations, let me revert for a little to the latter 
two. 

A life of diligence and holy fervour prepares 
the believer for a peaceful departure. " Father, 
I have finished the work which thou gavest me 



96 Conclusion. 

to do ; and now I come to thee." It was with 
unspeakable satisfaction that the Saviour con- 
templated His return to the Father's bosom; and 
the reason was because He knew so well that He 
had finished His Father's business. He could 
look back on the weary days and sleepless nights 
of His ministry, on the long years of His incarna- 
tion ; and He saw that there was no righteous- 
ness which He had not fulfilled, no precept of 
the holy law which He had not magnified. His 
memory could not recall an idle word or a wasted 
hour-; and even from the solemn twilight of 
Gethsemane His eye could trace serenely back 
the whole expanse of His earthly history, and see 
not ofte word which He would wish to revoke ; 
not one act which He could desire to alter ; no 
sermon which, if He had to preach it over again, 
He would make more plain or more importunate; 
no miracle which, if it had to be performed 
afresh, He would do in a more impressive or 
effectual manner. He knew that there was no 
omission, no defect ; and though the whole were 
to be done anew, he felt that the words could 
not be more gracious nor the works more won- 
derful than they had actually been. " Father, I 
have glorified thee on earth. I have finished 
the work which thou gavest me to do ; and now 
I come to thee." The Lord Jesus was the first 
and the last who ever was able to say this : but 
through His strength made perfect in their weak- 



" / have Lost a Day 1 .' 97 

ness, some have made a nearer approach to this 
blessedness than their more remiss and indolent 
brethren. It was the grief of the pagan emperor 
Titus, when a day transpired in which he had 
learned no knowledge or done no good, " I have 
lost a day." And — 

"'Tis a mournful story, 
Thus in the ear of pensive eve to tell 
Of morning's firm resolves the vanish'd glory, 
Hope's hone}'' left within the with'ring bell, 
And plants of mercy dead, that might have bloom'd so well.' : * 

But it is a far more mournful story when the eve 
of life arrives, to be constrained to sigh, " I have 
lost a lifetime." " God gave me one lifetime, 
and it was once in my power to spend it as 
Aquila and Priscilla spent theirs, as Paul spent 
his, as Phebe spent hers. But now, that only 
life is closing, and, woe's me ! how have I be- 
stowed it ? In dressing and promenading, in 
paying morning calls and evening visits." " And 
It — I have spent it in reading newspapers and 
novels, in dancing and singing songs, and telling 
diverting stories." "And / have spent it in 
drinking and smoking, in games of cards and 
billiards, in frequenting taverns and theatres, in 
reading coarse tales and books of blasphemy." 
Yes ; and though you should not need to look 
back on a life thus sinfully spent, it will be sad 
enough to review a life let idly slip. To think 

* Mrs Sigourney. 
G 



98 Conclusion. 

that by a right starting, and a persevering con- 
tinuance in well-doing, it was once in your power 
to have proved the large and permanent bene- 
factor of your generation ; to think that had you 
only begun with the Lord and held on in fervour 
of spirit, you might by this time have finished 
works which would make many bless your 
memory, and planted seeds of which hundreds 
would reap the pleasant fruits when yourself 
were in the clay ; and then to remember that 
once on a time you had it in contemplation, it 
was all planned out and resolved upon, and 
day-dreamed over and over, but never resolutely 
gone about — to recollect " the morning's firm 
resolves " and sunny purposes, and then look at 

" the vanish' d glory, 
Hope's honey left within the with'ring bell, 
And plants of mercy dead, that might have bloom'd so well ;" 

how dreary it will make your death-bed, if cap- 
able of deliberate reflection then ! How discon- 
solate it will render the retrospective evening 
of your days, should you reach old age ! And 
how different it will make your exit from his, 
who, looking back on his eventful career 
could say, " I am now ready to be offered, 
and the time of my departure is at hand. 
I have fought a good fight, I have finished my 
course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there 
is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which 



Keepsakes. 99 

the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at 
that day." 

A life of Christian diligence is followed by an 
abundant entrance and a full reward. There 
are two principles deep-seated in our nature : 
philosophy has go~t no name for them, but the 
Bible has an eye to each of them, and the 
gospel speaks to both of them. The posses- 
sions which we chiefly prize are either those 
which we have earned by our own industry, or 
gifts we have got from those we truly love. 
Perhaps there is some little slide in your desk, 
some secret drawer in your cabinet, which you 
do not open often ; — but when on a quiet holi- 
day you pull it gently out and look leisurely at 
it, your eye fills with tears. You read the date 
on the faded book-marker with a pensive smile, 
or you press the little picture to your lips, and 
drop upon your knees to pray for him whose 
image that little picture is. But a hard-visaged 
stranger peering over your shoulder might 
marvel what all this emotion meant ; for he 
would not give a crown-piece for the whole 
collection, and would see the materials of a 
more rational interest in the bunch of bank- 
notes and bills and government-securities in the 
adjacent locker. And why do you prize it so ? 
That picture was a keepsake from your brother 
when he crossed the Indian main ten summers 
since ; — that broidered ribbon is the only relic 



ioo Conclusion. 

of the sister's love, who made you many a like 
remembrance, but whose mouldering fingers 
will make no more. Love lingers in these relics, 
and that is the reason why, when you stuff the 
bank-notes in your pocket, you clasp these 
trifles to your heart. Far more, if the gift or 
the bequest be one of vast intrinsic value. The 
estate, the house, the lands which a fatherly 
kinsman or a dear friend conveyed to you — you 
prize them infinitely more than if they had come 
to you in the course of nature, or by the laws of 
ordinary succession. As you look over the pas- 
tures and corn-fields, the tear sometimes tingles 
in your eye, and you are again filled with amaze- 
ment as you think of such unaccountable kind- 
ness. You commemorate the unusual gift by 
the giver's name. By some adjective of grati- 
tude you connect it with his dear memory ; and 
much as you may value it for its inherent worth, 
it is more precious still for the beloved donor's 
sake. 

Then, next to the possessions round which 
there hovers some symbol of living affection or 
departed kindness, we prize those possessions 
in which we recognise the fruits of our -own 
diligence, the purchase of our own painstaking. 
What a bright coin was that first sovereign 
which your own diligence ever earned ! How 
solid and weighty did it feel ! How fair did the 
monarch's image and superscription shine on 



Earnings. 101 

its fresh-minted face, and how endless did its 
capabilities appear ! And wherefore such over- 
weening affection for that one golden piece, 
for had you not possessed from time to time 
pocket-money of your own before ? Yes— but 
it came too easily ; it wanted the pleasant 
zest of industry ; it did not bring into your 
bosom, as this one does, a whole freight of 
happy recollections, frugal hours, and self-de- 
nying labours, condensed into one solid equi- 
valent, one tangible memento. What are the 
books in your library which you chiefly prize ? 
Next to the gift-Bible which solemnised the 
first birthday when you could read it ; next to 
the book which your dying friend lifted from 
his pillow, and with your name tremulously in- 
scribed, handed you on your last visit, when he 
yet had strength to do it ; are they not the 
books which rewarded your blushing pro- 
ficiency at the village school, or commemorated 
your nightly labours in the first and happiest 
years of college-life, or those which your long- 
hoarded savings first enabled you to purchase ? 
Why do you look with a kindlier eye on that 
juvenile literature than on the long rows of 
glittering learning and august philosophy which 
fill your crowded shelves ? Why, but because 
the light of early days and industrious hours 
still floats around them. They are the sunny 
shrines in which much of your former self lies 



102 Conclusion. 

pleasantly entranced, ready to start into a mel- 
lower life the moment memory bids it. Or why 
is it that in the midst of luxuries and accom- 
modations as abundant as wealth can purchase 
or ingenuity suggest, fruit from trees of the 
proprietor's own planting, or from a garden of 
his own tending, tastes so sweet ? Why is it 
that the rustic chair of his own contriving, or 
the telescope of his own constructing, so far 
surpasses any which the craftsman can send 
him ? Why, the reason is, those apples have an 
aroma of industry, a smack of self-requiting 
diligence peculiar to themselves. That rustic 
seat is lined with self-complacent labour ; and 
the pleasant consciousness of having made that 
telescope himself has so sharpened the maker's 
eye, as greatly to agument its magnifying power. 
God has so made the mind of man, that a 
peculiar deliciousness resides in the fruits of 
personal industry. 

The possessions which we chiefly prize are the 
gifts of affection and the fruits of painstaking ; 
those in which something of ourself, or a dearer 
than ourself, still lives, and speaks, and feels. 
Now in regard to the heavenly inheritance 
itself, the God of Love has consulted both of 
those deep-seated principles of the human soul. 
The heaven itself, the passport through its gates, 
and the right to its joys are the purchase and 
the gift of Another. Nor is it to the believer 



Heaven. 



103 



the least enhancing element in its priceless 
possession that it is entirely the donation and 
bequest of his dearest Friend. Looking forward 
to the pearly gates and golden streets of the 
celestial city, its love-built mansions and its life- 
watered paradise, the believer in Jesus delights 
to remember that they are purely the purchase, 
and as purely the gift of Immanuel. To think 
that he shall yet have his happy home on that 
Mount Zion ; that, with feet no longer sin-defiled, 
he shall tread its radiant pavement and stand 
on its glassy sea ; that, with fingers no longer 
awkward, he shall tell the harps of heaven what 
once he was and who made him what he is ; 
that, with a voice no longer trembling, he shall 
transmit along the echoes of eternity the song of 
Moses and the Lamb ; to think that his shall 
yet be a brow on which the drops of toil will 
never burst, and an eye which tears will never 
dim ; that he himself shall wear a form that 
years shall never bend, and a countenance 
which grief can never mar ; that his shall yet 
be a character on which the stains of time will 
leave no trace, and his a conscience pure 
enough to reflect the image of Him who sits 
upon the throne — the thought of all this is 
amazement, ecstasy. But there is one thought 
more which puts the crown upon this blessed- 
ness — the climax on this joy — 

"These glorious hopes we owe to Jesus' dying love." 






104 Conclusion. 

The name of this fair inheritance. Free Grace, 
God is Love, Jehovah-Tsidkenu. identifies it 
with that name which the Christian loves be- 
yond all others. That heaven to which Im- 
manuel is the living way, — on whose earthward 
entrance atoning blood is sprinkled, on whose 
many mansions and amaranth crowns are the 
symbols which connect them with Calvary, and 
amidst all whose countless joys, the river of 
deepest pleasure is the love of Jesus, — this is 
the only heaven to which the believer expects an 
entrance, and is the one of which his intensest 
longing says, "Would God that I were there !" 
But even in this purchased possession there 
are ingredients of delight of an origin more 
personal to the believer himself, — details of 
special blessedness, for the germ of which he 
must go back to his own earthly history ; and 
just as the sweetest surprisals here below are 
those in which some effort of benevolence long 
by-gone reverts upon you in its happy results — 
when you meet a stranger, and are charmed 
with his Christian intelligence and spiritual 
congeniality, and lo ! it turns out that his re- 
ligious history dates from a casual conversation 
with yourself in the guest-chamber or the public 
conveyance ; or when you take refuge from the 
storm in a wayside cottage, and surveying with 
eager interest its arrangements of unwonted 
comfort and tastefulness, or listening to the 



Bread o?i the Waters. 



Bible lesson of its little children fresh from 
school, mysterious hints of some similar yet 
different scene steal in upon your memory, till 
you begin to think, " I have surely been here 
before ;" and anon the full truth flashes out ; 
you have been there before, when it was a very 
different scene — when a drunken husband and 
ragged children and broken furniture aroused 
your desponding commiseration ; but the tract 
which you that day left has introduced sobriety, 
and a Sabbath, and a Family Bible into that 
abject home, and made it what your grateful 
eyes now see ; — so the sweetest surprisals of 
eternity will be similar resurrections of the 
works of time. When the disciple has forgotten 
the labour of love, he will be reminded of it in 
the rich reward ; and though he never thought 
any more of the cup of cold water which he 
gave, or the word in season which he spake in 
Jesus' name — though he made no memorandum 
of the visits of mercy which he paid, or the 
asylums which he found for the orphan and the 
outcast — it seems that they are registered in 
the Book of Remembrance, and will all be read 
by their happy author in the reviving light of 
glory. To find the marvellous results which 
have accrued from feeble means — to encounter 
higher in salvation than yourself those of whose 
salvation you scarcely ever hoped to hear, and 
learn that an entreaty or prayer or forgotten 



106 Conclusion. 

effort of your own had a divine bearing on the 
joyful consummation — to find the prosperous 
fruit already growing on the shores of eternity 
from seeds which you scattered on the streams 
of time — with what discoveries of unexpected 
delight it will variegate the joys of the purchased 
possession, and with what accessions of adora- 
tion and praise it will augment the exceeding 
weight of glory ! O brethren ! strive to obtain 
an abundant entrance and a full reward. Seek 
to be so useful that the world shall miss you when 
away ; or whether this world miss you or not, 
that in a better world there may be many to 
welcome you as you enter it, and many to follow 
you when you have long been there. Above 
all, so live for Christ, so travail in His service, 
that when you fall asleep, a voice may be heard 
from heaven, saying, "Blessed are the dead 
which die IN THE Lord : yea, saith the Spirit, 
that they may rest from their LABOURS, and 
their works do follow them." 




NOTES. 



Note A, p. n. 

It would not be easy to estimate the good of which 
day-dreams have defrauded the world. Some of the 
finest intellects have exhaled away in this sluggish 
evaporation, and left no vestige on earth, except the 
dried froth, the obscure film which survives the drivel 
of vanished dreams ; and others have done just enough 
to shew how important they would have been had 
they awaked sooner or kept longer awake at once. 
Sir James Mackintosh was one of the latter class. 
His castle -building "never amounted to conviction; 
in other words, these fancies have never influenced 
my actions ; but I must confess that they have often 
been as steady and of as regular recurrence as con- 
viction itself, and that they have sometimes created a 
little faint expectation, a state of mind in which my 
wonder that they should be realised would not be so 
great as it rationally ought to be." — (Life, vol. i. p. 
5.) Perhaps no one in modern times has been capa- 



108 Notes. 

ble of more sagacious or comprehensive generalisa- 
tions in those sciences which hold court in the high 
places of human intellect than he ; but a few hints 
and a fragment of finished work are all that remain. 
Coleridge never sufficiently woke up from his long 
life -dream to embody completely any of the glorious 
visions which floated before his majestic fancy, some 
of which the world would now be too happy to pos- 
sess. And, returning from secular philosophy to 
matters of Christian practice, has the reader never 
met those whose superior gifts would have made 
them eminently useful, and who had designs of use- 
fulness, philanthropic schemes of peculiar ingenuity 
and beauty, but who are passing away from earth, 
if they have not passed away already, without actu- 
ally attempting any tangible good? And yet so 
sincere are they in their own inoperative benevolence, 
so hard do they toil and sweat in building palaces 
of sand, that nothing could surprise them more than 
the question, "What do ye more than others?" 
unless it were their own inability to point out the 
solid product and permanent results. 



Note B, p. 90. 

A happier exemplification of the text in the depart- 
ment of tuition can nowhere be found than in the 
Life of Dr Arnold of Rugby. 

' ' The most remarkable thing which struck me at 
once on joining the Laleham circle was the wonder- 
ful healthiness of tone and feeling which prevailed in 
it. Everything about me I immediately found to be 



Notes. 



109 



most real ; it was a place where a new-comer at once 
felt that a great and earnest work was going forward. 

"Dr Arnold's great power as a private tutor 
resided in this, that he gave such an intense earnest- 
ness to life. Every pupil was made to feel that there 
was a work for him to do — that his happiness as well 
as his duty lay in doing that work well. Hence, an 
indescribable zest was communicated to a young 
man's feeling about life, a strange joy came over him 
on discovering that he had the means of being useful,- 
and thus of being happy ; and a deep respect and 
ardent attachment sprang up towards him who had 
taught him thus fo value life and his own self and his 
work and mission in this world. 

' ' All this was founded on the breadth and com- 
prehensiveness of Arnold's character, as well as its 
striking truth and reality ; on the unfeigned regard 
he had for work of all kind, and the sense he had of 
its value, both for the complex aggregate of society 
and the growth and perfection of the individual. 

"Thus pupils of the most different natures were 
keenly stimulated ; none felt that he was left out, or 
that, because he was not endowed with large powers 
of mind, there was no sphere open to him in the 
honourable pursuit of usefulness. This wonderful 
power of making all his pupils respect themselves, 
and of awakening in them a consciousness of the 
duties that God had assigned to them personally, and 
of the consequent reward each should have of his 
labours, was one of Arnold's most characteristic , 
features as a trainer of youth. His hold on all his 
pupils, I know, perfectly astonished me. It was not 



1 10 Notes. 

so much an enthusiastic admiration for his genius, or 
learning, or eloquence which stirred within them ; it 
was a sympathetic thrill, caught from a spirit that was 
earnestly at work in the world — whose work was 
healthy, sustained, and constantly carried forward in 
the fear of God — a work that was founded on a deep 
sense of its duty and its value ; and was coupled with 
such a true humility, and such an unaffected simplicity, 
that others could not help being invigorated by the 
same feeling, and with the belief that they too in 
their measure could go and do likewise. " — Mr Price's 
Letter in Arnoffis Life, vol. i. pp. 41, 42. 




INDEX. 



Actinia, or Sea-anemones, 3 
^Eropus, n 
Arnold, Dr, 108. 

Book of Remembrance, 7 

Buffon, 61 

Burney, Dr, 25 

Business, A, or lawful calling-, 
incumbent, 11 ; diligence in, 
promoted by punctuality, 
26, method, 28, prompti- 
tude, 30 ; animated by love 
to Christ, 33, 37 

Bustle, 29 

Callings, Various, 22 

Calvin quoted, 94 
Coleridge, 108 

Day-dreamers, 10, 21, 107 
Dejection, Cure for, 54 
Diligence, viii., 91 
Dryden, 61 

Eliezer of Damascus, 83 

Fame, Love of, 39 

Fervour, lect. iv., without 

activity, 69, 75 
Fountain, Intermitting, 53 



Gospel, The, sweetens and 
dignifies labour, 1 ; enlists 
in a good service and sup- 
plies the willing mind, 47 

Goode, Dr Mason, 25 

Guilt interferes with indus- 
try, 78 

Heaven, elements which en- 
hance its happiness, 103 
Heyne, C. G., 61 

Idleness, 3 ; busy, 5, 18 
Industry, lects. i. and ii., 

sweetness of its fruits, 

102 

Jesus Christ, the Christian's 
Lord and Master, 32, 36 ; 
love to Him promotes dili- 
gence, 37 ; a motive equal 
to all emergencies, 42 ; His 
finished work, 96 

Jonah, 73 

Jones, Sir W., g6 

Joseph, 83 

Keepsakes, 99 
Liberality, ix. 



H2 Index. 


Mackintosh, Sir J., 107 


Scabiosa Succisa, 13 


Maid, The little, 83 


Scholar, The diligent, 85 


Method, 28 


Scripture, Sobriety of, 63 


Money, Love of, 39 


Servant, The faithful, 31 




Sigourney, Mrs, quoted, 97 


Newton, Sir Isaac, 61, 87 


Snow melting, 59 




Somnambulists, 9 


Oak uprooted, 16 


Sorrow paralyzing, 79 


Onesidedness of human sys- 


Spirit, The Holy, the source 


tems, 64 


of strength and happiness, 
56759 
Spirituality, x. 


Paul's love to Christ, 43 ; re- 


trospect of life, 98 




Pendulum, compensation, 37 


Teacher, The, his high call- 


Perseverance, 14 


ing, 88 


Peter's fervour, 49 


Thomson's " Castle of Indol- 


Pool, The stagnant, 51 


ence," is, 21 


Promptitude, 30 


Time, Economy of, 24 


Punctuality, 26 


Titus, Emperor, 97 




Todd's "Student's Guide," 11 


QuARTER-AN-HOUR, the lost, 




27 


Useless people, 3, 17 


Reynolds, Sir J., 61 


Venn, Rev. H., 41 


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mons on the Book of Job." Crown 8vo, 6s. cloth. 
_ "The sermons are simple and plain, but very full of instruc- 
tion." — Record. 

Memorials of the Rev. Joseph Sortain 

B. A., of Trinity College, Dublin. By his WIDOW. Post 
8vo, 7s. 6d. cloth. 
"In both taste and feeling the book is a most favourable spe- 
cimen of religious biography." — Christian Remembrancer. 

"This is a charming biography. The whole volume is re- 
plete with varied interest. We trust it will have an extensive 
circulation." — Record. 

The Basutos ; or, Twenty-three Years in 

South Africa. By the Rev. E. CASALIS, late Missionary 
Director of the Paris Evangelical Mission House. Post 
8vo, 6s. cloth. 
"The work gives us a capital insight into the life of a power- 
ful African tribe." — Athenceum. 

"An interesting volume ; . . . should find a place in every 
missionary library." — Christian Observer. 

The Path of Life; or, The Nature, Origin, 

and Reception of Salvation. By the Rev. WILLIAM 

LANDELS, Author of "Woman's Sphere and Work." 

Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

"This is a practical treatise of great force and much beauty, 

which we can conscientiously recommend to young persons of 

educated taste and serious inclination." — Patriot. 

Brief Memorials of the Rev. Alphonse 

Francois Lacroix, Missionary of the London Missionary 

Society in Calcutta. By his Son-in-Law, Rev. JOSEPH 

MULLENS, Missionary of the same Society. Crown 8vo, 

5s. cloth. 

"Missionary life in Bengal has never been more truly and 

graphically described than in Dr Mullens' deeply interesting 

memoir of his revered father-in-law. It is a thoroughly 

honest book." — Spectator, 



14 James Nisbet &■* Cols 

Life- Work ; or, The Link and the Rivet. 

By L. N. R. , Author of " The Book and its Story." Crown 

8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

" Every minister's wife should have a copy of this book, as 
the best guide she can have in doing good to the poor, and pro- 
viding for the improvement of the neglected and the outcast." 
— Wesley an Times. 

Herbert Percy ; or, From Christmas to 

Easter. By L. A. MONCREIFF. i6mo, 2s. 6d. cloth. 

"This little book is excellent in style, in tone, and in moral. 
The story is well sustained, the conversations natural without 
being wearisome, the events striking enough to awaken interest 
without being improbable." — Edinburgh Evening- Courant. 

The Testimony of Christ to Christianity. 

By PETER BAYNE, M.A., Author of "Christian Life."" 
Post 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

"An original and valuable work." — British Standard. 
"We commend it to intelligent Christians. . . . We trust it 
will obtain a very wide circulation.'' — Aberdeen Free Press. 

Pre- A damite Man ; or, The Story of our 

Old Planet and its Inhabitants, told by Scripture and 
Science. Fourth Edition, post 8vo, 10s. 6d. cloth. 

"The stores of learning which the writer brings to bear on 
the subject render the book valuable to men of more than or- 
dinary attainments. The illustrations to the volume are ad- 
mirabl e. ' ' — Morning Post. 

Daybreak; or, Right Struggling and 

Triumphant. By CYCLA, Author of "Passing Clouds," 
"Warfare and Work," &c. i6mo, 2s. 6d. cloth. 

" This is a handsome little volume specially adapted for the 
rising generation, and full of pleasant stories, which have every 
chance of becoming popular in the parlour as well as in the 
nursery." — Glasgow Daily Herald. 



Recent Publications. 



The Grapes of Eshcol; or, Gleanings from 

the Land of Promise. By the Rev. J. R. MACDUFF, D.D. 
Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 
" Mr Macduff has certainly produced a book of both pleasing 
and profitable reading." — Witness. 

Rambles at Sunny side ; or, A Week with 

my Godchildren. By AUNT CLARA. i6mo, 2s. cloth. 
"This is a pretty little book for little people, full of amuse- 
ment, and conveying in an attractive form important lessons in 
religious and secular knowledge in the simplest language." — 
Brighton Gazette. 

The Unseen. 

By WILLIAM LANDELS, Minister of Regent's Park 

Chapel. Small crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 
"We have been much interested in this series of Discourses 
upon the Unseen, as an able and vigorous, a full and impressive, 
setting forth of the leading features of a department of divine 
truth too much overlooked." — British aiid Foreign Evangeli- 
cal Review. 

The Hart and the Water-Brooks : A 

Practical Exposition of the Forty-second Psalm. By the 
Rev. J. R. MACDUFF, D.D., Author of "Memories of 
Bethany," "Morning and Night Watches," &c. Crown 
8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 
" The general characteristic of our author's production is a 

happy blending of exposition, practical appeal, and picturesque 

illustration." — Record. 

The Life and, Letters of John Angell 

James, including an Unfinished Autobiography. Edited 

by R. W. DALE, M.A., his Colleague and Successor. 

Demy 8vo, 12s. cloth : also a Cheaper Edition, post 8vo, 

7s. 6d. cloth. 
"Mr Dale has accomplished a difficult and delicate task with 
rare sagacity, fidelity, and success. He has given us a very 
beautiful biography. His criticism is reverent and discriminat- 
ing. His biography is artistic and beautiful." — Patriot. 

"The volume concludes with a chapter, by his son, on his 
home life, written with a truth, candour, and graphic skill, 
which give it a very honourable place amongst religious bio- 
graphies." — Saturday Review. 



1 6 James Nisbet &> Co?s Recent Publications. 



Memorials of Sergeant William Mar- 

jouram, Royal Artillery. Edited by Sergeant WILLIAM 
WHITE. With a Preface by the Author of "Memorials 
of Captain Hedley Vicars." Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

"These memoirs are very interesting It is edited by 

Sergeant White, the preface being written by Miss Marsh with 
her usual piety and good feeling." — Christian Observer. 

The Book of Psalms : A rranged in Daily 

Portions for Devotional Reading Twice Through in the 
Course of the Year. With Suggestions to Promote Per- 
sonal Application. By the Rev. A. R. C. DALLAS. 
New Edition, crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

"This work will prove useful. .... As a devotional manual 
we are glad to recommend the volume." — Church of England 
Magazine. 

Life in the Spirit ; a Memoir of the Rev. 

Alexander Anderson, A.M. By the Rev. NORMAN L. 
WALKER. With Preface by Principal CUNNINGHAM, 
D.D. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth. 

" The peculiar and pre-eminent value of this biography is, 
that it exhibits in practical embodiment and working the theory 
of conversion which excludes, and that which embraces, the 

Atonement We very earnestly commend it for perusal 

and study." — Witness. 

The Visitor's Book of Texts; or, The 

Word brought nigh to the Sick and Sorrowful. By the 
Rev. ANDREW A. BONAR, Glasgow. Fcap. 8vo, 3s. 
6d. cloth. 
" Mr Bonar, like the Master, has the tongue of the learned 
to speak a word in season to him that is weary. This book will 
be found singularly valuable in the sick-chamber. We recom- 
mend it most cordially to the use of all who delight to be in the 
sick-room or elsewhere ' unto God a sweet savour of Christ.' " 
—JLondon Monthly Record. 






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